The Underworld Podcast - Daniel Kinahan, Tyson Fury and the Irish Drug Cartel that Built a Boxing Empire - with Nicola Tallant

Episode Date: April 26, 2022

For years, Dublin-born Daniel Kinahan built on the work of his heroin-lord father Christy, aka the Dapper Don, to become one of the world's biggest cocaine kingpins. Kinahan fostered some of boxing's brightest talents, including world heavyweight champion Tyson Fury via his Marbella, Spain-based promotion firm and gym, MGM. But in 2016 assassins came for Kinahan on his home turf, kicking off a gang war and sending his cartel into a tailspin. Kinahan decamped to Dubai (where else), and MGM's promotions became MTK...but it continued as the latest in a long line of mob ties with boxing going back to the Luccheses in NYC. Last month the US Treasury slapped a $5m reward on Kinahan's head. Soon after, UAE authorities froze his accounts. Now he's on the run—but his fighters are still going strong. How did one of Europe's top mobsters get such a firm grip on the boxing world? And will Daniel Kinahan live out his fugitive days on an Afghan compound? We spoke to journalist and author Nicola Tallant, who's reported on the Kinahans for years, to find out more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Sell them on Deepop. Just snap a few photos, and we'll take care of the rest. And you at least get some of your dignity, money back. Someone on Deepop wants what you've got. Start selling now. Deepop. Where taste recognizes taste. It's August 2014 in Marbea, Spain, late night, and there's little noise outside the villa of Gary Hutch and Daniel Kinnahen, but crickets and the sound of former boxer Jamie Moore shuffling, half drunk, up the driveway. Moore, a champion-like middleweight from Sulford, England, won 32 of 37 pro bouts,

a down-to-earth lad, the so-called Fighters Fighter. He's best known for a brutal fight against compatriot Matthew Macklin back in 2006, fight of the year in tons of magazines, a slug fest that won the hearts and minds of fans all over the world. Moore is retired, but his former opponent Macklin, back then, wanted him in his own corner after that epic battle, and has brought him to the fame Macklin's Jim Marbeah,

or MGM, to coach him and other prospects for the big time. The MGM isn't just any other gym, and not just for the long strips of bars on the Costa del Sol that attract hundreds of thousands of holiday and merry makers each year. Its equipment is top of the range, coaches among the best in the world. It does charity work and there's even an upstairs bar called Solenture where trainers and pals can take the edge off after a tough day on the bags. At the top of the MGM tree are Hutch and Kinnahen.

They're two millionaire boxing fans and promoters and all-round party animals whose largesse is murky to say the least. They're often out on the town driving luxury cars and spurs. spending long nights at Solenture and the Strip. Moore in his clique know them simply as friends. To others, though, they're multi-enemies. The guys at MGM work hard and play hard, and Moore has been hitting the beach beers hard.

So when he rocks up at the villa late into the night and he sees a shadowy figure standing in front of him wearing a Frankenstein mask, the thirstful in his head is that it's just another laddie joke. When he sees the pistol pointed at him, he begins to sober up a tiny bit. You know what? he says at the masked intruder. That's not even funny.

then bang and Moore fills a white-hot pain in his right hip and he falls to the ground. More bullets fly. One hits his leg. Blood is pouring out of the two wounds. More hears a car's ignition fire and bolt away. More is close to death. Annie knows it. I thought I was finished and it's the emptiest most horrible feeling ever. More later tells British newspaper The Guardian. His wife Colleen is seven months pregnant with his first child, a girl. I felt helpless and lonely, he says, lying on a driveway at night bleeding to death. I thought, I can't die here. How am I going to leave my kids with no dad?

Moore can't stand up. The bleeding's too strong and he could lose consciousness at any moment. Instead, he reaches for his phone, laid on the ground and dials 911. He doesn't even know if that's the emergency number in Spain, but it works. Moore's drifting in and out, but he tells the operator to track his phone. 25 minutes later, an ambulance shows. Moore remembers looking up at the EMT. Please, he begs her.

Don't let me die. In the hospital, doctors operate on Moore to remove one of the bullets and stop the bleeding. It's only just missed a major artery. A few millimeters over, and more would be DOA. As it happens, he just survives. When I woke, I felt delirious

seeing all those nurses, he says. But I was happy too. Yes, I'm alive. Some people think the attempted hit has to do with Moore's reputation in the ring, but it's not. not. It's got almost nothing to do with him, but it has everything to do with boxing. And beyond that, the two men at the top of the MGM's ranks who've been blurring the lines

between boxing and organised crime more than almost anybody in the sport's long history. Welcome to the Underworld podcast. Hello, welcome to another episode of the show where we show you how, and you're not going to believe this, guys, sport has got a problem with organized crime. I'm your host, Sean Williams. My podcast's wife, Danny Gold, he's probably on a flatbed somewhere between Denepro and Maria poll, hitchhiking and tweeting his way across Ukraine. I think he's on some kind of European Jewish history tour. I'm not really sure.

Anyway, while he's doing that, we have somebody who can tell us about an issue that, and you're not going to believe this either, is right on the news. So we're going to actually do something topical on this show for a change. Nicola Talent is an Irish journalist and author and podcaster, who last year wrote Clash of the Clans, which is an amazing account of Irish organised crime centering on the Hutch, Kinnahunheim feud, which we got into in one of our first ever episodes like 25 years ago or how long we've been doing this.

So first of all, a massive shout out to Nicola. Welcome to the show. Thanks, Sean. Yeah, it's a pleasure to have you here. So we're actually on the news, which is a weird feeling for us. Last month, Daniel Kinnahen, that's the Dublin-born son of famous gangster, Christy Kinnan. He was sanctioned by the US Treasury as a cocaine, kingpin and violent criminal, with a reward of up to $5 million for his capture.

Kinahan since had his assets frozen in authorities in Dubai, where he's been living for years, of course. Various people have come to his wedding a few years ago, including Riddle and Taggi, who we covered a bunch for his Macro Mafia in the Netherlands. But we're going to talk about Kinahan's association with boxing, where he's been a keen fan, promoter with the firm M.T.K. going way, way back. Some of his stable includes British fighter Billy Joe Saunders, and more famously, of course, Titan Fury. This weekend just beat, well, didn't beat, he destroyed, Dillian White

at Wembley Stadium in front of 94,000 people. Probably the best heavyweight in the world at the moment. So, yeah, this is happening right now. And Tyson Fury has done enough to get cancelled about a billion times over. I'd probably urge people to see what he has to say about women and various things, but it's his connections to the mob, which have been making headlines. Something he says is, quote, none of my business, except they literally are his business. So, yeah, again, welcome to the show,

Nicola. And I wonder if you can start by telling us a bit more about MTC and Tyson Fury and how he's linked to this sort of major drug kingpin that's been called out by the treasury. Well, you set the scene there really in your introduction when you told the story of the shooting of Jamie Moore in Marbeah, and Moore was at that time staying with Daniel. Daniel Kinnahen in his villa. He was over training in the club, which was then known as MGM Marbea. It had been set up in around 2012 by Matthew Macklin and his very good friend, Daniel Kinnahen. And it was essentially a bit of a nirvana for boxers, the club.

A lot of, you know, boxers weren't being signed up. A lot of them weren't going to maybe make a professional career out of it and found themselves in the sites of MGM. and being brought over to Spain, been put up in these beautiful villas and getting the top training and diets and everything you need. The shooting of Jamie Moore really starts the story for the public.

The rise of the Kinnahen Mafia had been going on for a long time. But that, really, that shooting in 2014 really sort of should have alerted boxing to what was going on behind the scenes. Now, that's a long time ago, isn't it? And here we are today only talking about it. So Jamie Moore returned to England after that shooting.

MGM, the club he was working in, continued. And a year later, there was a shooting of the aforementioned Gary Hutch, who had been not so much involved in boxing. I think more a boxing fan. He would have maybe trained at that gym. But he was the kind of the criminal business partner of Daniel Kinnahen. There had been an enormous growth of the Kinnahen Mafia since they left Ireland around the turn of the century.

They had started out as street dealers here in Dublin. Daniel Kinnahen's father, Christy Kinnahen Sr., known as the Dapper Don, a convicted heroin trafficker in Ireland, had sort of left prison here, gone out to Europe and set himself up as a major wholesaler with dreams of becoming the first Irish mafia down in the country. Costa del Sol, dreams that would come true. And they had been out there growing, growing, growing.

By 2010, there was a Europol operation against them called Operation Shovel. And the Spanish led that. The UK police were involved, the Irish. There was a load of house raids between Ireland, the UK and Spain. There was a low 20-odd people were arrested, brought before the courts. The Spanish police came out and in a press conference said they had shut down the Irish Mafia. They had been, had them under surveillance for a number of years. They reckoned that they were worth a hundred million at that stage.

And they said they were very highly skilled and trained in counter surveillance. They named Daniel Kinnahen, his brother Christy Jr. And his father, Christy Sr. as being basically the kingpins of the operation. But the Spanish legal system is slow, arduous. I don't think it's probably fit for purpose for organized crime. and differently to other territories in Spain, the police investigate, in this case over two years, they then hand their entire investigation files to a magistrate

and a magistrate then re-investigates it from the beginning. So it can often take up to four years before it comes to court or to fruition. And in the case of the Kinnahans, they had very powerful lawyers, they got themselves bail and they got out and sure enough their business was back up and running. And sort of alongside that was Daniel Kinnahen's dreams for creating this boxing, you know, Nirvana, a place where he was to become the main boxing broker in the world and where he was to have a stable of these very famous athletes under him. So after Moore's shooting and following on from that a year later, when Gary Hutch was shot dead, there was serious problems on the criminal side of the business. it culminated in an attempt on the life of Daniel Kinnahen here in Dublin in 2016 at the Regency Hotel where there was a boxing way in.

And it was a big homecoming for MGM at the time. They were to have a big extravaganza, boxing extravaganza in the National Stadium. It was the day before that was due to happen. And this very dramatic sort of terrorism style attack on him with a gang that came into that way in with collaboration. Ashnikov weapons and he survived, but his friend David Byrne died. That moment really was certainly for the Irish police a moment when they realized the threat of narco-terrorism as opposed to just drug gangs. This was a very public event where there was members of, you know, there was kids,

there was all sorts of civilians milling around. It was a hotel. It was very, very dangerous incident that occurred. and it resulted in a big crackdown from a criminal point of view on the Kinnahen mob and on their rivals in the Hutch mob. They'd once all been together, they'd fallen out, jealousies, allegations of money being owed and various other things. But that crackdown started and the culmination of that has been these sanctions,

which were announced in the last couple of weeks here in Dublin, the US sanctions on them a very dramatic move. but all the while Kinnahen has managed to continue his rise in the sport of boxing and he has denied every accusation put to him he has managed to create a kind of an army really around him of boxers who've supported him throughout and very high-ranking promoters including Bob Aram in the US probably the most famous promoter of all has over the years come out and said there's nothing to

see here, Daniel Kinnahen's a really good guy. Yeah, he's not, though, is he? Well, no. I mean, in your book, which is fantastic, I really, really enjoyed reading it, you go into, I mean, it's not going to surprise anyone that boxing and the mob have been tied up for a long, long time. You've got stuff going back to murdering,

and the Lucchase's in New York, and I found a few interesting things online. I mean, there's a guy that wrote the arc of boxing that said that, quote, the mob's influence was pervasive during the 1950s, primarily because they controlled the international boxing club, which is the sports major promotional outfit. And since the IBC controlled televised boxing,

that gave the mobsters even more power. So, you know, the very authorities that have been administrating the sport back in the 40s and 50s were very, very deeply tied up with the Italian crime families. And that's kind of gone through. Could you tell us a bit more about kind of Sammy the Ball and the 90s and what came out during those times about boxing as well. Yeah, there's actually very interesting testimony online.

Sammy the bull or the rat, as they called him. Fellow podcaster. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I went to get in touch with him to see what he come on. But he gave testimony to the US Senate. And he spoke in great detail about what the plans were and why the mob were interested in boxing. And really he sort of spelled out how it was seen as a place to launder money.

You know, they were buying up gyms. They were fixing fights in those days. I don't know a massive amount about boxing, to be honest with you. My knowledge of boxing comes tragically from my job working around organised crime. So, you know, things haven't changed so much. But certainly, you know, he spoke about a lot of things that would have echoed to the last few years what's been happening in boxing are certainly as suspected of being happening. And the US sanctions have confirmed that really because not only have individuals been sanctioned,

but promotional companies in the US have been sanctioned as well that are, you know, Daniel Kinnahen is behind. And look, there's obviously a lot of money washing around in sport. Boxing has traditionally sort of engaged this whiff of sulfur. But I do think that when we're reaching, back to examples from the 1940s and 50s. You know, surely things should have changed. We're living in the modern world now.

You know, you'd like to think that with the advent of social media and the internet, that people can be more aware of what's going on. They can inform themselves a little bit easier than back then, back in those days. You know, secrets aren't so easy to keep now. And in actual fact, what's happened now, in modern times in boxing has been, you know, synonymous with that childhood story

of the emperor's new clothes because everybody has realized who Daniel Kinnahan is. They've just decided to just blindly ignore it. And it's only really now that the sanctions have come in and the finances are threatened that boxing,

boxers and promoters are running for cover. And they're claiming they had nothing to do with him. They didn't know what he was involved in. and they're cutting off all ties. But it interests me to see that because at no point did anybody, it seems to me, take a moral stand

and say, do you know what? We don't want drug dealers involved in a sport. We don't want drug dealers involved in boxing. The way it is here in Ireland, and I think it's the same in a lot of other countries across the world, boxing tends to be a very working-class sport. It's a way for kids from less advantaged communities,

maybe to get involved in something, to feel part of something, to be good at something. Exercise, etc. is very good for everybody. And I think the idea to have drug dealers and predators, as I would call them, which is what drug dealers are,

tangled up in that place, which should be a safe place for kids, maybe not coming from some of them from, you know, very secure, stable families and maybe going into that sport, looking for mentors, looking for people that can guide them through the difficult years of childhood

and into the teenage years and onwards to life to kind of a good life, you know, to pick a life that isn't going to be tangled up with guns and drugs and greed. And for me, I think that was the sad part of this latest scenario with boxing that, you know,

there weren't strong enough characters there to say, no, we don't want this for our sport. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting that even after like an episode of narco terror in the heart of Ireland that this cartel, Kinnahen at least, was able to sort of continue his rise within the sport. I actually wanted to take you back

a little bit first because I'm interested in how you first got onto this kind of Kinnahen beat, how you sort of first started working on this I mean, unbelievably huge organised criminal outfit which is unprecedented in Ireland and is one of the biggest sort of cocaine cartels in Europe. not the world. So how did that all kick on?

Well, largely because I have been working as a crime journalist for nearly 30 years now. And if you're working as a crime journalist in Ireland, you can't really ignore the Kinnahen mob. Because as I said, they did start here as street dealers. And that's what's quite extraordinary. You know, in 2010, the Spanish tell us they're worth a hundred million and they've shut them down. In 2022, the US tell us they're worth a billion and they're still going. And really when they started off in Dublin in the late 90s and early 2000s, they were selling deals of Coke.

You know, I don't think Daniel Kinnahen was ever very hands-on. I think he was born slightly with a silver spoon in his mouth because of his father being so prolific in the drug scene. To bring you back to, I suppose, the 1980s in Dublin and Ireland, we had a heroin epidemic here. There was quite a big recession. and there had been Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel

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Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Certain planning decisions made prior to that where a lot of kind of more underprivileged people would have been living in tenement houses in Dublin, which were totally unfit for purpose. And large housing estates and flat complexes had been built very good. quickly in order to house them and get them out of those dangerous homes. But they hadn't put up the structures around them. They hadn't put in the proper, you know, schooling and the proper social

structures. And like vast amounts of people unemployed with no prospects were all housed together in what basically became ghettos. It was depressing times. And at the same time, heroin was arriving in Europe and it was coming in cheap. And there was, a particular individual called Larry Dunn, who would have been the first godfather of crime here in Dublin who saw an opportunity, and he started to buy that heroin and pump it into those working class estates.

And it caught on like never before. Heroin always sort of, in my view, people who take heroin, maybe do it to kind of, they're in pain in some way. There's some trauma there. I remember speaking to a drug counsellor one time, a long time ago,

and he said, you know, he'd been years and years, decades in it and he said he didn't think he'd ever met a heroin addict who hadn't got some trauma in their background and a lot of that was coming from you know alcoholism long-term unemployment all that sort of stuff so heroin gripped dublin and larry done was making a fortune and he bought a big house up in the dublin hills he had a chauffeur driven limousine he lived it up we didn't have the criminal assets bureau at that stage which is the the the assets recovery agency, which goes after anybody that spends money and shouldn't have it. And, you know, he became a real kind of character.

But he was very fond of his own supply and that would ultimately undo him. He was also sort of bit paranoid and used to mind his supply in his house, which when a place was raided and, yeah, yeah, not the cleverest, shall we say. Yeah, that's not plan A. But he'd made millions at the same time by the time he was caught. But there was a, Christy Kinnahen was in the background. He was eyeing up the money that could be made. Kinnahen was a bit of a cuckoo in the nest when it comes to Gangland.

He was a middle class guy from a very privileged upbringing. He was educated. He had choices in life. He was very, very intelligent. He was very good at sport. He was pretty good at anything he put his hands to. If he had gone into legitimate business, he could have been an Elon Musk or whether you call him, somebody that we should

you know there's there's debate out there about him at the moment with Twitter but nonetheless I think Kinnahen could have been a big massive big successful businessman and legitimate business but he chose instead crime and he when Larry Dunn was put away Larry Dunn very famously here made a comment as he was as he was been brought off to jail if you think we're bad you should see what's coming after us

and he was quite prolific for a guy who, you know, wouldn't have had much smarts, really. But that was an incredible statement. And he was right. And coming up behind him, watching his demise and stepping into his vacuum was Christy Kinahan Sr. He, the first time he's caught in Dublin with supply in his own home, which he wouldn't do again, is with a very significant player from the European drug market, a guy from

Lebanon who's kind of a big wholesaler in Amsterdam. So it's like as if Kinnahen sort of jumped up the ranks. He didn't start, he wasn't standing on any street corner. He was, he was cutting out the middleman and he was buying himself directly from Europe. He went into jail. He told a judge that he had a problem with addiction and wanted to get an education. And courtesy of the Irish taxpayer, he did. He got a degree.

And he studied languages. He studied renewable energy. Back then, you know, that was before everybody would be jumping to realize that this was a, you know, an industry of the future. And he actually, when he was due for release, he wasn't finished his degree. So he asked if he could just stay in to get his qualification, which he was allowed to do. When he left prison, he went straight to Europe. And there he is developing a massive conglomerate, really. He's beginning to do that.

So he is really, really significant in the whole story. And I think without him, it wouldn't have become the enormous trans-global business empire that it is. His sons, Daniel Kinnahen and Christy Jr, who was also sanctioned, they kind of come in when they're in their very early 20s and they start taking control. But Daniel would have been seen as, you know, there's a lot of jealousies around him actually. and you always have to be aware of that when people are giving information about him because he was the son of, you know, the boss.

And he didn't have to claw his way up. He didn't have to fight his way up. He didn't have to take up a gun and shoot somebody to prove himself. He just got the top job because of his second name. And I think that's always stayed with him and perhaps that was part of the jealousies that saw the gang implode under his leadership in between 2014 and 16.

Yeah, I think the Elon Musk comparison is holding up throughout all this actually. So 2016, this kind of huge attacks happened. How do things pan out after that? And how does MGM continue to be such a sort of, you know, headquarters for boxing on the continent? I mean, will people not picking up on it by then? Well, I mean, certainly after the murder that day of Daniel, or sorry, of Daniel Kinnahen's friend, David Byrne,

like anybody working in crime here in Ireland, be they in law enforcement or in journalism or whatever, knew that this was going to be horrendous. To go for the head of the snake and miss in any sort of an organised crime arena, his rivals had gone to take him out and they had missed him and he needed to show that he had his control back and his power back and in doing so there was just this wave of bloodshed unleashed in Dublin it was very dark times actually within three days of the attack at the Regency Hotel

the city was in lockdown it was literally there was a ring of steel around the north inner city where his rivals would have been based the rivals and their families because it was a community. And bear in mind, because these guys had worked together for years and fallen out, it was a highly dangerous situation because they knew everything about one another. They knew where they lived. They knew who their parents were. They knew who their enemies were.

They knew what their weaknesses were. So it kind of made it a very volatile situation. But within three days of that attack, a hit team had gone through a guarder ring of steel, had gone right into the centre of that territory in the north inner city where the rivals lived and had shot dead. Eddie Hutch was the chap's name. He was a relative of the man that was blamed

on going for Kinnahen and missing. And they got away. And that was really a sign of what was to come. And over the next certainly six months, there was murder after murder after murder in the city centre. and I was my offices are based actually not too far from that area of the north inner city and there was certainly weeks in which we would often hear the guard of helicopter overhead

and we'd go out onto the balconies and it was either a assassination attempt or it was an assassination and it could have been a Tuesday morning it could have been a Friday afternoon on your way home from work the city could have been shut down again it was horrendous And it was a show of strength. And as a kind of warfare, what the Kinnahen mob did was they not only sent in their hit men and their hit teams to kill. But they also put neighbours and members of the community on retainers that were living around their rivals. and they divided and destroyed that community, which was always sort of impoverished, I suppose,

a little bit chancery. There was always a lot of individuals in the area that were kind of, you know, they would have come up stealing from the docks and selling mattresses or whatever that came off the freight containers that they might have nicked. But it was always a community nonetheless.

And there was always people there. and the women in particular of the community would have always taken somebody in if they were hard on their look and they stuck together the north inner city but the blood money that was pumped into the community

has destroyed it forever because I suppose you'd have had a lot of people there maybe with addiction problems maybe people who owed the Kinnahen crew money maybe people who were just frightened of them and they were telling on their neighbours every time they went out every time they moved

and as I say there was all these murders that this evidence would later come out in court about how you know safe houses were used or spotter houses were used and they were previously

you know had grown up with the victims and had been school friends of them but they had turned to the Kinnahen side and it was bad and it was also again that word narco-terrorism was being used a lot

and the threat of organised crime was previously watered down as such in Ireland in 1996 when the journalist Veronica Giren was killed and the full powers of the state came against the criminal gang that had directed her murder. The Criminal Assets Bureau had been set up and we were keeping a lid on it as such. Nobody can control organised crime

but there was certainly a lid being kept on it and this was a realisation that these guys felt untouchable And in a way they were because they had migrated from these shores a long time. They had first migrated to Spain, as I say, and after about 2016, after this crackdown started on them in Ireland, they migrated again to the United Arab Emirates. They left Spain for good and never returned. MGM continued operating. Many other boxers were signed, including ex-Irish and English Olympians. the company carried on regardless.

In September of 2016, the Regency shooting happened in the February. The police, the Guardsal, along with their Irish counterparts, raided the gym, and they arrested a guy called James Quinn, who was subsequently tried and convicted of the murder of Gary Hutch,

who was killed in the 2015, and really whose murder was the reason they went for Kinnahen in the... regency. But the gym was raided and the gym continued going. I found that that was the start of my sort of jaw dropping with it. Why is nobody saying anything here? Surely this raid, you know, is something that is significant to boxing, but no, it was ignored. The gym and its intellectual rights moved to Dubai around the same time Daniel Kinnahen did. In about 2017, there was an announcement

that MGM had been sold. Now at some point just before that, there had been some legal challenge by MGM in Vegas about the name and there had been a settlement and they had changed the name to MTK. But we were told outright Kinahan and Macklin had sold up. They'd sold to a woman called Sandra Vaughn. and she was a new owner. They had nothing to do with it. It had literally the decks had been cleared. But if you're a crime journalist, Sandra Vaughn wasn't that unfamiliar.

And she had mingled around the sidelines with them before. And the idea that it was now based in Dubai and was a neighbor of Daniel Kinnahen was sort of a little bit questionable as well. It's the third act of any respected gangster that you wind up in Dubai. And then you get a villa on the beach and then eventually the US Treasury is the one who puts out of PR about you. And then that's when things start to fall apart.

Perhaps. But you, I mean, when you've spoken to people in the sport about these links that you've been covering for years and years going back, what's the reaction? Do you get Stonewall? Do people actually kind of admit that there's this sort of very strong link with cocaine importation across Europe? Very few people in the sport have been speaking about it at all. And like the boxing journalists have been on a different trajectory. I can slightly understand them because MTC has become a very powerful force in boxing. But I think, you know, it's been funny.

I work for a newspaper called The Sunday World in Dublin, which is a very much a tabloid newspaper full of crime in the front pages and sport in the back. and often over the years, you know, we'd have a story about Macklin and the mob or, you know, how, you know, the Kinnahen Crime Group were travelling to the states en masse to support Macklin. And in the back, they'd have the story about who Macklin

was going to K.O. And no mention of the mob. And that's the way it went. And I think the sports journalists, the boxing journalists were very much, you know, under no illusion that if they started moving into this territory, they were going to be banned. And they were.

MTC issued a ban on the Irish media for a year from 2017. I think Sandra Vaughan, one of our first roles she took as CEO of the company was to come out. She had a pink silk

pussybow blouse on her and her hair up and glasses on her, I recall. And she did an interview with IFL TV, which was sponsored by MTCA and she told them that the Irish media

were basically very pesky, very annoying, wouldn't stop mentioning Daniel Kinnahen and therefore they were being banned. Now that didn't bother me or any of my crime journalist, comrades, because we didn't really need to speak to boxers to know or nor did we need to attend boxing bouts, but the Irish boxing media were banned. They weren't allowed to interview anybody that was signed to MTC

and bear in mind, most of the biggest boxers this side of the world were with them at that stage. So they were very proactive in trying to shut down the media and trying to gag it. And that actually comes all the way from the top from Christa Kinnahen, Senior.

In recent weeks, I have been privy to some social media he has been on in recent years while moonlighting as an aviation broker in Dubai. And he called himself Christopher Vincent, by the way. He just cut off Kinnahen and just character

on regardless, but he had all these social media postings and musings about Russia and Putin. He quite likes Putin, actually. And he thinks the Russians are a little bit misunderstood. He's anti-VAC. And he is one of these conspiracy theorists, anti-mainstream media, you know, any opportunity he gets his anti-mainstream media. And that has filtered down, I think, probably to Daniel and then onwards. I think MTC thought they could just control the narrative in, you know, banning journalists from their fights, therefore people were going to have to start being nice about them. You know, in recent years, I don't know whether you realise this or not, but it was last year,

I think, or it was maybe around the time of the panorama documentary, the BBC documentary, because that came out and that really put the focus on the influence of organised crime and boxing. But after that there was a lot of pro-Kinnahen propaganda really from some of the boxers and stuff. But Billy Joe Saunders, who's an English boxer and who was signed up, he contacted me and direct messages. and he was sort of chatting away about, you know,

why are you so bitter or something? And then he asked me, did I want to do an interview with Daniel Kinnahen? And he said that I could come to Dubai. And it was Valentine's Day, was coming up. So maybe we could go on a bit of a date, me and Daniel, and have a little chat over dinner and lovely, yeah. And that I'd find him a really nice guy and stuff. So I just was replied businesslike that I said,

look, I said, I'm prepared to do a podcast with him. We can record at both ends so nobody can be accused of being unfair. Because, you know, if I was going to write a piece, I could do an interview and I could take and lose what I wanted out of it. So in the interest of fairness, I suggested this. So he came back to me and he said he could arrange it if I wrote something positive about Daniel Kinnahen first. And that, you know, that is, that was obviously a,

a strategy that they thought was going to work. And, you know, it's an extraordinary thing to think that a crime gang can believe that they can, you know, that they can direct the media. Yeah, yeah. The same media that they're sort of admonishing all the time for presumably lying about everything under the sun. But, you know, in a way, like they did, and boxing backed them really because, um, I think the boxing correspondence have been, you know, to do that job,

you need to be able to have your contacts within boxing and you need to be the one who's given the interview and, et cetera, et cetera. And you need to be ringside to report well on any of these things. And I think that they did pick and choose who they allowed do that. And their supporters were brought closer and maybe given the bigger stories and anybody who complained against them. So in a way they did, Putin-style taxics, shall we say, they did try to shut down, you know, not being funny about it, but they did try to control the media.

And, you know, and then in a way that worked for them because they were able to lean on the positive stories and show them and kind of point to them as reasons why they were okay. Yeah, and, and I mean, first time, I guess he's got a future maybe in Chechen boxing or MMA, right? Well, MTC have folded in the last few days. They have announced that they've closed down. They lasted, I think, 10 days after the sanctions are certainly a week. The US Treasury came in with these sanctions.

I mean, you couldn't have anything more powerful to happen. It's been an incredible piece of, behind the scenes policing really because this wasn't just a quick PR exercise by law enforcement to get themselves out there and to get named and be on television.

This was a very long, drawn-out plan to deconstruct a trans-global mafia. Hotels.com is the place you go to book hundreds of thousands of hotels. It's exactly what it sounds like. Just like save your way from Hotels.com is exactly what it sounds like. Choose to save now with an instance.

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It's the beginning of the end, I think I'd say. but what the plan was, so they could have brought in Kinnahen or attempted to and his father and his brother and jailed them, but the show would have gone on in the background. I think what they've actually done is they have created a new blueprint for police and globally.

And that is cooperation, intelligence sharing and using what each country has to fight against organized crime. So the sanctions will, ultimately strangle the, you know, they will put off their oxygen, which is their finances. The power of the US forced the UAE to freeze their assets. That happened within a week. And obviously showed that the UAE weren't just friends anymore, that they were going to politically

move with the US as opposed to protect a gang of criminals. So the Kinnahans would always have escape routes planned. My information is they'd be heading deeper into Oman. They will have a lot of investments all over the world. It's not like they have nothing. If you and I have nothing, we might be able to pay our mortgage or the electricity bill. Their nothing is a very different figure in the bank account. But they have a lot of investments in West Africa, you know, in China, in Russia, etc. So they will have squirled away, they're running away money and they will have cash reserves to last them. But where do they go? Like, it isn't, and there isn't an infinite amount of places willing to take them in. They've been trying to make ties with Pakistan.

There was talk that they were, you know, they could go to Afghanistan. I mean, the name of God, these guys live it up. You know, they live it up. And I can tell you, Afghanistan wouldn't be a place for them to live. but nonetheless they will try to keep on the move. For a long time, they were untouchable. They were so powerful. And the day the sanctions were announced, it struck me that they had become the hunted. And that's where they will remain in that place until they are eventually brought to justice.

I was going to say, I mean, have you faced any, it seems like they're being a bit cuter than to sort of outright threaten you, but have you faced any sort of, you know, worrying or fearful moments following this group around? I mean, your book is about as forensic look at their history and their operations as you get. So I'd be surprised if they weren't knocking on your door every now and then. Well, look, they know exactly who I am and, you know, I'm a pest to them, along with all the other crime journalists. But they don't, the top tier don't exist in this country and they haven't come back here since 2017.

So there's that. In 2016, I did receive quite a serious threat from the ranks of that organisation. I was issued with a Guard information message that there was a credible threat to my life. And that had to be handled. It's sort of like most of these things abated 2016 and after the Regency was a very volatile time. And there was a lot of people under threat. But I'd always say that as journalists, as crime journalists, we have a job to do. we're not victims of crime.

If anything does come to our door, we're part of massive big media conglomerates. My own company, Media House, a huge big European company. They have dealt with threats to their journalists in many different territories, including the Netherlands. I mean, here in Ireland, definitely, and in other European countries, if there is a threat at all to a journalist,

you're surrounded by the powers of the state, by the powers of the Guard of Chicana, the police, your own corporate entities, it's not the same. It's what it is and it usually blows over. It's a blast of nearly publicity. I don't like giving oxygen to it,

but I think really it gives you a little bit of an understanding what it's like for people who are actually, you know, being threatened. An understanding without that backup, if you understand me, just how much, how to it can be on your life more than anything, but most people who are threatened by the Kinnahans and their cohorts have no backup like that whatsoever.

And I'm sure they're absolutely terrified. And it's not just a threat because the reality of what they can do has played out before us 18, 20 times over in this city in a very short period of time. and, you know, in many cases they went for the loved ones of those they were after. They went for people who were friends of their targets. In a way, their warfare has been so dirty in gangland terms that it has broken all those old rules. They have crossed a line in the sand and that's a case of everybody's fair game. And if they can't get the individual they want, they'll go for their loved ones around them. that's that's a new wave of of violence within the underworld for sure and i guess just finally is there anything in the sport of boxing that's suggested to you

that things are going to change i mean 94 people 94 000 people came to london on i think it was saturday night to see tyson fury fight despite all the noise before the fight being about his connections to daniel kinnahen so you know they haven't voted with their feet um The sport going back has done very little, I guess, to try and mend or to try and refute its connections to organise crime. So I don't know, are there any noises coming out of your work that you've seen that suggests things might change? I think that Kinnahans are now toxic in boxing. There's no question of it. And you can see everybody running for the hills and claiming that they weren't really that friendly after all with them.

I think their involvement in boxing has ended. And I think that the reverberations of what has happened are going to be felt for a long time. And, you know, there's going to be a lot of money taken out of boxing in the UK with the fall of MTK in particular. And, you know, with Kinnahen, you're going to see, it's going to take a while. It's like with the sanctions with the Kinnahins.

This isn't just the end. and this isn't how it's going to pan out. You know, you'll see over the next couple of months what's going to happen. And, you know, we might see what kind of money was being pumped into boxing from organized crime when you see it, when you see it not being there anymore. I think that it's just, it's going to take a long time to untangle. To me, it's like boxing and the Kinnahun organization,

it's like if you put your Christmas tree lights away in a bit of a haste, and you take them out at the beginning of December and you go, what did I do here? And it's just a knot that you sit down in the couch and it takes you a long, long time to untangle it all. To me, that's what it's like. And, you know, we really can't see what's going to happen in the geography of boxing immediately.

It'll just take a little while to sort of, for the dust to settle. Cool. Well, yeah, in the meantime, people should definitely read your book and understand more. about this whole world because it's it's pretty crazy and some of the some of the kind of run-ins and things that you've seen over the course of the last few years following these guys is it is worth the read alone I found it's it's really exciting and kind of a yeah real thriller and you also got a podcast so tell us a bit more about that Nicola as well um before I let you carry on with your your work yeah I'll have one to do I'm sure today yeah podcast is called

crime world and it sort of dips into all sorts of aspects of crime like everything, McKinnahan's feature heavily because they just don't go away, do they? But yeah, I sort of do interviews with people and sometimes I do long reads, you know, of stories that are worthwhile and a bit of everything. Cool.

It's doing very well, actually. It just shows how the crime genre is so popular. You know, I think people are interested in it, getting a bit of intimacy about crime. You know, crime can be for years, like I reported largely in the newspapers and, you know, I would have done broadcasting and TV stuff. But you always have to remain very, very serious and you come across as if you're extremely serious person. I like the podcasting because it allows you give a little bit of yourself and a little bit of personal anecdotes or whatever. And that makes it more interesting for the listener, I think.

Yeah, I, you know. I can only be so unprofessional. before I have to just try and have a laugh, otherwise. It just sounds like a complete incompetent. But yeah, I know what you mean. Well, everyone should go out and buy your book. Try and get it from somewhere other than Amazon

because Amazon sucks, but it's everywhere. And yeah, Nicola, thanks ever so much for joining us. It's really interesting insight into something that's, I guess, going to develop over the coming days and weeks, right? Absolutely. Okay, thank you, Sean. Cheers. Some follow the noise.

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