The Underworld Podcast - The Super Cartel King: Daniel Kinahan

Episode Date: December 16, 2025

In the wake of the EncroChat bust, swaths of the world’s biggest narco traffickers have been swept up by European cops — from Balkan tough guys to Camorra capos. Somehow, though, the man who connects them all has kept his hands clean. How did Daniel Kinahan go from Dublin goon to global cartel leader? And how long can he stay out of trouble? Sean spoke to The New Yorker’s Ed Caesar, who’s written about Kinahan, to find out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Bad advice? You talking to me? Kayak, got that right. May 17, 2017. at Dubai's Burge al-Arab, a vast sail-shaped hotel on the coast of the Persian Gulf. The world's only seven-star venue, it calls itself, with a helipad on which Andre Agassi and Roger Federer once played tennis. But on this particular day, the Burge is playing host to a very different constellation of heavy hitters. In one of its glitzy gilt-line ballrooms, the underworld wedding of the year is taking place.

Walking down the aisle, Quiva Robinson, tall and blonde, from a suburb in North Dublin. A man to be, Daniel Kinnaham, short and sturdy, thinning hair, just short of his 40th birthday. Robinson's ex-husband, Micah Kelly, had been murdered just six years previous, shot 14 times by an assassin who then reversed over his body. There's little chance her latest beau will suffer the same fate, though. Kinnahen is known by many as one of the faces of top-line boxing promotion, especially through his relationship to world heavyweight champ Tyson Fury, who sat, of course, among the wedding guests. But Kinnahen is also the head of a giant cocaine cartel.

Some call it the super cartel, spanning dozens of countries and smaller vassal gangs that law enforcement have named after him. The Kinnahen organized crime group really is a global affair. And in Dubai, many of them have found a home away from cops' prying eyes. Riddwin Taggi, a murderous Dutch Moroccan dealer, he's there at the verge. So is Eden Gassanin, a Bosnian Dutch kingpin. Rafaeli Imperiali of Italy's deadly Camorra, he's there too. Shortly before, Italian police had discovered two stolen Van Goghs at Imperiali's home near Naples.

Kinnahen and Robinson take their seats on thrones beneath a giant chandelier. The ceremony begins. This will be the high point for many of those attended, who cops will soon sweep up in a wave of raids and arrests in the coming years. Many related to the decryption of Encrochat and Sky ECC. Probably the biggest windfalls in European police history. But Kinnahen, who keeps well away from such tech, stay a free man, married and running his empire from Dubai. Some call Kinnahen untouchable, a man who'd learned all there was to learn from his fraudster, drug smuggling Father Christie,

surrounded by a network of killers, hard men, and money laundering the likes of which the world has barely ever before seen. But will Kinnahen's seven-star freedom really last forever? Is it truly possible to mastermind across continental, more than multi-billion dollar cartel without running into serious trouble. This is the underworld podcast. Hello everyone and welcome to the weekly podcast that forages about in the global font of organised crime, picks the ripest stories and tells them in a way that informs, educates and entertains. So we're just like the BBC, but without the input of former political aids or about $100 billion.

I am Sean Williams in a bright and sunny Wellington, New Zealand. my boy to his first test match a couple of days ago, and I've got more pre-Christmas deadlines than the average London Coke dealer. And I'm joined today, not by Danny Gold, who I think is taking the week off to visit a Buddhist silent spa retreat somewhere, but Ed Caesar, a UK-based reporter, author,

and contributing writers to the New Yorker magazine. I last spoke to Ed about his rangy article on the Encro chat and SkyEC bus a couple of years back, and we're catching up today about Daniel Kinnahan, because Ed just published a big piece at the magazine. on him. Firstly, a reminder to sign up to our Patreon if you want bonus shows, interviews, reading lists, all that good stuff, or just to throw us a few holiday bucks, but onto the episodes, which, yeah, it's a really, really cool one. So, Ed, thanks for joining us today.

Your story for The New Yorker, which brings together all these kind of disparate and expansive pieces into one narrative, begins with a wedding at a place called Bersh al-Arab in Dubai, which if people don't know is the world's, I think it purports to be the world's first seven-star hotel kind of ridiculous sail-shaped place on the sea. Who's getting married and what's the significance of that moment and why did you decide to lead with that? So Daniel Kenehan is getting married in 2017 to Kiefer Robinson

and this is a fantastic melting pot wedding. There's people from all different kind of parts of Daniel Kinnon's life. His family are there. the people from the world of boxing. There's a group of the world's biggest cocaine traffickers. There's this room full of people who I'm going to come back to the story. So it just made, just in narrative terms, it just felt like a really easy call. Like that's where you have to start the story.

He's getting married. This is the world. Glit, but also secrecy. Dubai is going to play a big role in this story. So it's great that we're in this fancy hotel. where you can get a gold leaf cappuccino or whatever, that's going to be, that's important for the story

because that world is going to be important, you know, in narrative terms as well. So, yeah, it made a lot of sense to start at that. And this is in 2017. I mean, you've got these guests, including, you mentioned some of these people. I mean, you've got Tyson Fury, obviously the links between Tyson Fury and Daniel Kinahan

have been talked about before. But then you have eating Kassanin. I think I'm saying his name right, Bosnian-Dutch guy. Gatchanin. Gatchanin, sorry, apologies to Balkan listeners. And then you've got Ricardo Rekelemy Vega, a Chilean drug importer, and you've got Rafael Imperiali, who's one of the leaders of the Comorra. So this is like a who's who of who in the drug trade.

But it sort of goes south for many of the protagonists from there on, right? This is 2017 since a lot of them have been rolled up by police busts. but all except for Daniel Kinnahann. This guy is purportedly worth a billion dollars. So how has he managed to slip through the net? Like, what is it about him that has made him sort of impervious to the grips of law enforcement where the other guys have been locked up? So a few things to say about this.

The first is that I don't know exactly, right? Because if I did, I'd really know something that everyone's been trying to work out for ages. So I don't know precisely, but I'll just give you some atmospherics here, which is that when I went into Europol, who did all the analysis for the big encrypted phones, stings, so Sky ECC and Anchorage chat in particular, the most interesting thing that they said to me was Daniel Kinnahen himself was never on these big networks. And you can see in those conversations that other people in the organization, in the Kinnahen organization are on the networks, more junior people. And if you wanted to get a message to Kinehan, to Daniel Kinnahen on these networks,

you had to have a conversation with one of his lieutenants who would then go and meet him in person to discuss whatever it was that he wanted to discuss. So that was smart because one of the reasons why Rakelame, Imperiali, Gatchitin, why they've all, you know, met law enforcement and are now serving time is because they were on the chats and there's hard evidence of them planning various things. It's been the biggest police breakthrough in decades. And the reason why it was such a big breakthrough is because people would explicitly talk about crimes that they were in the process of commissioning. And that's what happened in a lot of those cases. With Kinnahen, it's more difficult because he is not personally on the chats.

to Sean McGovern, who was the guy that one of the two people used to go and meet him to relay messages, he is now in prison in Ireland awaiting a court date. And it's just easier to build a case against someone who you've got

on a phone saying this and this and this. So I think that's one reason. The other reason is he and his dad and his brother are unbelievably good networkers. So they have a very strong network of people who can help them. I mean, there was someone on the books at MTC Global,

which was Kinahan's sports business, boxing business, who was 20 years in the Dubai government, you know, trained at the Dubai Police Academy. If you listen to Imperiales evidence, there are people in those Dubai organizations that are extorting drug traffickers

to keep them out of prison. There is a network in which corruption plays a, plays a role here. And I think the Kinahan's just must have played an incredibly smart game in terms of who their friends are and how they're rewarded. You mentioned the encro chat bus that we spoke about, I think, a couple of years ago when you did a story about that as well. And I think the cops were saying that it was like, I think you said that it was like being at the table while they were literally discussing which crimes to do. Yeah. And so there's still spill out from that happening now in sort of criminal networks, right?

There's a backlog in the Crown Courts in the UK of Encro cases still. It remains, you know, nothing will ever beat it in terms of the gathering of incriminating evidence. And if you ask now, like what criminals are using to talk to each other, yeah, some of them are still on private encrypted phone networks, but they're much smaller. They don't have the reach of Sky ECC, which everyone was on for all. while. A little period of time, everyone was on Sky ECCC. You know, people are using these much smaller networks. They use things like signal, you know, they use off the shelf, you know, 3-mail, whatever. But it's, it was just this idea that they were all in the same place for a while and that suddenly the cops were able to read that stuff, which was just that once in a generation

moment. Apart from his kind of savvy in not being on encro chat and other networks like that, Let's take it back to the kind of inception of the Kinnahen cartel, back to his father, Christy, and back to Ireland. Can you tell us a little more about how Christie comes through the underworld there and how his sons kind of build a far bigger empire? So, yes, Christy was from a middle-class family. I drove past the house, actually, where he grew up, and I looked it up on Right Move, and it's nearly a million euros.

It's like a lovely sort of terraced house and a nice bit of Dublin, you know, middle-class family. He did was not from the mean streets, Christy Kinnair. But he found that he had a talent for crime. He got in with a, you know, a bad bunch. He was good at, he could cash checks. He had a plausible kind of Anglo-Irish accent. And when he was coming up in the late 70s and the 80s, That was the time of which heroin was getting its hooks into Inner City, Dublin.

And there was a guy who basically was the king of Dublin heroin, Larry Dunn, who was arrested in the early 80s, and I think eventually jailed in the mid-80s. And Christy Kinnahen, Sr., spotted an opportunity, and he started importing heroin. When Dunn was put away, he started importing heroin. and that was his start in the drugs trade. What's incredible about Krista Kinan Sr. is that he has at every turn

sought to improve his skills as a criminal. So when he got sent away to Port Leach Prison, he was doing open university courses in different languages. He was, you know, apparently he reads George Soros, you know, business books. He is Thorough every turn in his criminal journey. Like, how can I improve as a criminal?

So he, you know, he'd spent a lot of time inside. He'd moved to the Netherlands at a certain point. So, 1996, after Veronica Garen's murder. So Veronica Gereen was an investigative journalist, right? Yeah, she was gunned down in Dublin, right? Yeah. And that kind of caused a lot of, of, of controversy. Obviously, it was a huge scandal in Ireland at the time, right?

Yes. but it led to this huge public outcry naturally because this outstanding journalist has been shot in broad daylight and people think criminality at this point has got out of hand, you know, that's brazen. And that led to the formation of something called the Criminal Assets Bureau where police could seize the assets of convicted criminals.

And the formation of the Criminal Assets Bureau encouraged a lot of Irish gangsters is to move to the continent. And a lot of them ended up in Amsterdam or the Netherlands more generally. And Christy Kinnon made a lot of great contacts out in Amsterdam. And that's really that that's the beginnings

of what we come to know is the super cartels. That period in the 90s, he was working with John Cunningham, who had kidnapped one of the Guinnesses and had been sent to prison for it and then had escaped from prison and then ended up in the Netherlands. And that's really the start of cartel.

But also, Daniel Kenyon, born in 1977, his younger brother's couple years younger than him, Christy Jr. So their mother, Jean Boylan, was not in the criminal world at all. She was a, you know, she was a cleaner. She had a number of different jobs, including at the local police station. I was hilarious to hear an old detective tell me that she was actually, like, widely beloved. And when she got ill, you know, a lot of the cops, you know, you know, wished her well. I mean, she eventually died, you know,

they were genuinely sad about it. Everyone knew who our connections were, but, you know, she was loved all the same. Strumbs was a really Irish story there. So she split up with Christy Sr. And they brought up the boys on her own and did not want them to go down the path that their father had gone down,

but they felt his pull anyway. And by their late teens, you know, late teens Daniel's running drugs for his dad in Dublin. And that's really... And they're very different thing. Guys, right? They have completely separate characters. Daniel and his father, yes, I would say.

And also Daniel and his brother, yes. Daniel and his father, Christy, much more cerebral, perhaps, ruthless, quite cold, but, you know, cerebral. Daniel, more genial, perhaps more violent. you know, made great connections with other criminal enterprises, but was also very quick to anger, was worried about his, you know, his reputation is standing in the community. One of the detectives, retired detectives,

who I spoke to his story, was saying that he had this insecurity about the fact that other criminals thought he'd been given the keys to the kingdom, you know, without having had to earn it. And he would, and Daniel would constantly seek to, reassert his authority. Yeah. So that was quite an interesting psychological insight. And then his little brother, Christy Jr., who again was not as outgoing or as peacockish

as Daniel, but did have skills in terms of, you know, being more analytical, you know, good with numbers. And his dad starts grooming him for the money laundering side of the business. And so how does this thing, I mean, where did they, make their first moves then? How do they first kind of establish themselves there? It's collaboration, right, chiefly, that they're really good at working with other groups, right?

They're working with other, yeah, so they're really good at working with other groups. What happens in the early 2000s is that the whole scene really moves to the south of Spain. And there's a lot of different criminal groups down there. There's, you know, mafia from basically all over the world down there. There's also representatives of South American cartels kind of touting for business. And that's where the empire begins to grow. It's really striking to me that by, he's by 2009,

Daniel's role in the drug trafficking business is large enough that it's noticed by governments. So, you know, the U.S. ambassador in Sierra Leone sends a cable later published by WikiLeaks saying, you know, there's this guy seeking to Daniel Kinnahen, who is a major, you know, narco trafficker, who is seeking to extend his network to West Africa. And that to me is really striking

because they're already talking about Daniel as being kind of the important figure, not his dad, and he's only 30-odd at that stage. So that was interesting. The Spanish police start getting very interested in these guys after there's a murder in 2000. 2008s and that leads to Operation Shovel in which they were all arrested.

And that uncovers something that I think is quite emblematic of the group, right? Operation Shovel is where the police figure out that the Kinnahans have gotten so big because they're fantastic money launderers. They're great at hiding the cash and scurrying it away where other groups are quite, well, they're not quite as savvy in that way. And like you said, they're working out on the West Coast of Africa and there's suddenly this international criminal cartel. But also they're getting more violent, right?

I mean, you mentioned this 2008 killing of Paddy Doyle, who's an associate of the Hutches. Could you just tell us a bit more about that feud that's quite, I guess it's well known in Ireland, but maybe not outside, yeah. Yeah, okay. So to cut an extremely long, bloody, complicated story as, you know, to tell it as succinctly as I can, the Hutches began working with the kinens.

And that was a link that Daniel kind of brokered, you know, and they essentially became one gang for a while. And for reasons, you know, some of which are known and some of which are not known, that relationship began to fracture in the mid-2010s, if not before. So Gary Hutch, who was the son of the kind of family organization, Jerry Hutch, the nephew, sorry, graffiti started appearing around Dublin, Gary Hutchy rat. I thought he was giving evidence to the police. And there's this big attempt to try and squash this, you know, emerging disagreement. Excema is unpredictable.

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At first, I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light, and I was transported to another place. Pluto TV! Then I heard a voice. Come with me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and shows, and they were all four. Free. The truth is our city.

It's just so beautiful. On Pluto TV, free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100 NX files may cause excitement, loss of sleep and sudden belief in extraterrestrials. No credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. Along the way here, by the way, like someone gets shot who's not meant to be shot and there's a punishment shooting, it's return, and there's some sort of deal. Anyway, it all comes to nothing because Gary Hutch is murdered, which is in 2016, in the south of Spain. And as a response to that, it is widely believed that the hutches plan to get their own back. And at a boxing way in at the Regency Hotel in 2016, there's this incredible attempt on Daniel Kinahan's life, which ends up not killing Daniel Kinahan, but killing other people instead and causing widespread panic.

But the details of this attack are just astonishing. There was a man dressed as a woman who walks into the hotel alongside this guy called Flat Cap, who is not wearing a disguise for reasons that I've discovered later. So they start shooting. A group of armed SWAT police seemingly turn up and also start shooting. Those people turn out to be impersonating police officers as well and are just trying to kill Kinnens. the whole thing is A, botched, but B, so baroque and like out there. And I remember talking to this detective Noel Brown, who said to me,

you know, he was working, you know, in this world. So he gets the call very quickly. And he remembers having this very clear thought. It's like people running around with AK-47s in Dublin in the middle of the day. It's like, this does not happen here. This is like something that happens in. Mexico or something. And he just felt like some Rubicon had been crossed at that point.

Like, we've got to get a handle on this. You know, these people think they could do anything. A number of things happened after that. Daniel Kinnahen was in a rage and vowed revenge. And Hutches started being killed, you know, one after the other. This feud went on for months and months of months. I think 16 people were killed. after the Regency attack, including a couple of people who had nothing to do with crime,

including this poor man who worked for Dublin City Council who happened to look like one of the hutchers, who was on holiday in New Yorker with his family, and he was shot dead. So there's, you know, his feud spills onto the Dublin streets. And during all of this, the actual senior leadership of the Kenahans, like the, you know, the Kenyans themselves have moved to Dubai. They've gone. So all of this stuff is being carried out by underlings. Right.

So it's really, really like a fascinating period. And I think at that point, Daniels understood something quite important, which is that, like, I need to somehow distance myself from what's going on here. You know, that's what, his work with boxing really ramps up at that point. His work, you know, his work in trying to, like, wash his nose. name and try and create a different persona for himself really ramps up at that point. But he'd opened a boxing gym with Matthew Macklin, a pretty decent fighter back in 2012. And he was getting in with some of the biggest fighters in the world at this point.

And he was very, he wasn't a hit in a way figure, right? He was quite public within the sport. Yeah, really public. Yeah. To my lasting regrets, I mean, I understand what happened. But, you know, even in New Yorker pieces, that are very long to like most lay readers, a lot of stuff gets cut from first drafts.

And I wanted to tell the story, which perhaps I can tell you now, but I met Matthew McLan over a period of weeks in 2007 when I was doing a profile of Ricky Hatton. So Maclin was one of two boxes who was training at the same gym, which was in East Manchester, and Billy the preacher Graham,

who was a trainer who had a snake a cage on the premises, was training Ricky Hatton in the lead up to his Floyd Mayweather fight. And anyway, so I met Macklin in that period, and he couldn't have been nicer to me. He was lovely, chatty. He just lost this epic fight to Jamie Moore and had met Kinnahen already. I didn't know about the Kinnahen connection, but, you know, he would sort of teach me about boxing and there were sometimes in the gym where they were like a man short or something, and I'd work as his corner man,

so when he finished after around, I'd be getting his mouth guard out and give him a splash of water or whatever. And when I was finished for the day, he'd drive me back to the station. We'd have a chat in the car and he'd play Irish folk music and what have you. How good. And a couple of years later, he set up a gym with Daniel Kinahan in the south of Spain.

and he becomes essentially, you know, his business partner, and Kinehan says, you know, Matt Klins my best friend in an interview with some boxing magazine. So the links go pretty deep. I think that sort is just kind of interesting in that, like, I found him to be totally, like a totally nice, amenable, personable guy, just not, you know, not threatening in any way.

have any links to crime or anything, but the facts are the facts. Like, he is in bed with, you know, one of the world's biggest cocaine traffickers. Yeah, yeah. So the boxing, you know, Kinnahen has a genuine love for boxing. He really does, he loves the sport.

But it's also kind of a convenient thing for him to be into. The gym was a very good place for people to meet. When M.T.K, which was his company, set up in Dubai, they set up at Jimmy Dubai. One of the fascinating bits of reporting was, like, you know, I was told by people who would know that Raphael, Imperiale and Rido Antarge, Dutch criminal, used to stop by,

and people would be like, oh, who's that Italian guy? And who's that, you know, who's that guy? They'd be like, oh, you know, there's just, you know, the lads and whatever. And they were just kind of accepted as kind of part of the furniture. So the two worlds did cross over. He wanted to separate them, but they were, they did kind of smush into one another. And you mentioned, so the big cash cow for Kenan at this point is cocaine.

When does a family get into cocaine? How does that become their biggest thing? I mean, it's no secret that Europe is awash with the drug now. But when did they start realizing that that was their thing? I think a lot of people realized in the 2000s that that was where the money was. I always go back to this. There was a brilliant bit of academic work done. I'm going to forget the name of the group that did it.

Maybe Insight Crime or anyway, I'll think about it. I think it's insight crime. Yeah, yeah. I think you mentioned it in the piece as well. Exactly. There was a brilliant bit of academic work, which was essentially that the Colombian cartels had lost the most lucrative bit of their trafficking into the US because the Mexicans had essentially taken control of transport and if you control transport you basically control the trade. You know, it's a logistics

business and you're the people that are going to make the most profit. And they saw in Europe a chance to make loads more money and deliberately turn to Europe as, you know, as a new market. They saw a massive new market and they weren't wrong, were they? Like, they were correct. They saw in Europe a huge untapped, not untapped, but not fully realized marketplace.

And they partnered with European crime groups and they have flooded the continent to such a degree that like wastewater analysis would say that, you know, triple the amount of cocaine was coming in or something crazy, you know, within a few years of that. So, that's a point.

So everyone was into cocaine, all the big criminal groups, because you can make fabulous amounts of money, which is what they're interested in. And this is your kind of rip-on, rip-off operations in Rotterdam and Antwerp. Right, in northern Europe. Yeah. But also, I think the Kenilans had a great thing going in Valencia. Okay. So they, in the port of Valencia, they had a number of contacts who they could rely on. But yeah, I think it's wherever you can get it in.

You know, Imperiali obviously had good contacts in Naples, but also like he could open a lot of Spanish ports, I believe. So what you're looking for is, you know, the route in and then onward logistics throughout Europe. And these gangs were brilliant, not just at doing that, but at finding other gangs who could help them put the whole chain together. So the Kinnahen's great skill, if you asked the DEA guys that were tracking them,

was collaboration. They did it better than other people. And that's why they became more successful than other groups, because they were able to collaborate. You mentioned in the piece, and I'm going to quote you here about Rafael Empire, Imperiali, sorry. And you say he explains that the so-called super cartel, so there's this kind of like huge so-called acclamation of different crims around the world. He said it was never a unified group, but rather a fluid association of criminals who made individual deals with one another based on shifting needs. And he says, quote, we're all dependent on each other, but also all competitors, sometimes with business partners and then our path separate again.

So it's almost like a Legion of Doom or like a sort of like franchise, right? Sort of with Kinahan at the top, is that kind of how to describe it? I think he was one of a number of, one of a few, but one of a few really big players with whom others in that network would, work on and it would always be on an individual deal-by-deal basis, which makes, to me, it makes total sense that you wouldn't set up these organizations in a very rigid way, that you'd always be fluid because stuff, you know, the circumstances of cocaine trafficking must always be changing, and therefore if it makes more sense to ship into a port in the west of Ireland rather than Valencia,

then you need a different group of people to help you do that, or if it makes more sense, sense to ship out of Brazil or Venezuela, whatever, you're going to need a different group to help you with that. So it's fluid because the conditions are fluid. It does sound like an exhausting job. Exhausting. And in fact, here's another thing that didn't make into the peace. So the guy, the prosecutor that was kind of on Imperiales tale for a long time said that by the time he was arrested in Dubai, he was a deeply, deeply unhappy man. He was working. essentially from his apartment on, you know, with like three computer terminals, Excel spreadsheets, you know, profit and loss accounts, you know, phones on the go.

And he was essentially up 21 hours out of every, you know, 24, monitoring these, you know, networks of deals and money and so on. And that in the prosecutor's opinion, when he was arrested, it was, in a sense, a kind of relief. Yeah, that sounds awful. Should we have sympathy for him? I don't know, but it does sound rubbish. I'm not, I'm not, I don't, I try not to be too moralistic about any of this stuff,

just to say, try and say, you know, to give people an insight into lives they might not know about. But it strikes me that a lot of these people must be deeply unhappy. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm not saying they don't deserve to be, but I'm just, you know, if you just thought about it for a second, of course. It's going to ravage your sense of security and well-being, isn't it? Yeah. Sounds like journalism a little bit. So in 20, I guess, to take it back to the boxing briefly, I mean, Kinnahans' association with Tyson Fury is probably what a lot of people.

people are going to know about him without knowing about much of the criminal aspect of him. Can you tell us about that association, sort of how it developed, and then there's this sort of bizarre deal. I guess it's not bizarre for boxing, but with Fury's deal to join top rank. So how does that all go down and how does it kind of spells disaster in many ways, right? Yes. So the long story, the slightly longer story about Fury and Kinnahen is that Kinnahen kind saved Tyson Fury. So after he beat Clitchko, he went on a massive tear for many months and, you know, years and put on lots of weight and hid lots of Coke and it was basically finished as an athlete.

You know, the Kinnahen Gym kind of brought him back to life and rehabilitated him as a fighter and got the weight off and so on. So I think there is that genuine feeling of, you know, really owing someone something, but also of this guy I think in that case did do a solid for this fighter that it was blowing up

anyway they're together and anyone who works in boxing in that period knows that if you want to do a deal with Tyson Fury you've got to go through Kenan Tyson Fury fought a couple of really astonishing fights after his comeback in the first Deonté Wilder fight

which was a draw in the end on the cards It's a fantastic fight. Unbelievable fight. When he got up from the dead off the canvas, you know, suddenly Tyson Fury was the hottest property in boxing. You know, loud, opinionated, courageous, looks different to other people, you know, just like suddenly it was like, okay, everyone wants this guy.

And there was this set of negotiations between top rank, Bob Aram's firm, and Fury through Daniel Kinahan about Fury joining top rank. rank. And we know about a lot of this because there was this lawsuit filed in California recently where a guy that used to work as a kind of consultant to top rank who was sent over to do that deal to get the deal over the line. This guy called Billy Keene has basically gone public with what happened. And the details are just astonishing. Like, you know, Kinahan being promised to have 10% of Fury's fight purse. you know, for every time he fights and deals, you know,

Kinnahen being kind of a consultant for top rank. And, you know, like millions and millions and millions of top rank's money flowing in Kinnahen's direction for, so that Fury will do this thing. And that's amazing. And then I guess, you know, the other really interesting thing that's happening at the same time is that Daniel Kinnon is trying to wash his name, trying to get away from that reputation as being a cocaine trafficker and a gangster and a, you know, being behind all these murders in Dublin and so on.

You know, there's a number of different strategies, you know, but he has a PR person, like I've seen the emails, you know, like he's consulting with this PR person who's, you know, and they, you know, they commission a film, this like mad film about the Regency attacks, which appears on YouTube briefly and then is taking down as a licensing complaint, but it costs them, you know, hundreds of thousands to do. The director is pretty reputable as well, right? I looked him up. Yeah, yeah.

Like, yeah, reputable director, you know, decent production values. Yeah, it costs a lot of money. But one of the other things that happens is the PR people say, like, maybe if you get your name more out there in legitimate boxing circles, then that's going to help. And so there's this moment in 2020 when Tyson Fury says, just this video, which is now infamous, saying, you know, I'm just after getting off the phone with Daniel Kinnahen, big up to, you know, Daniel Kinnahen for getting this two-fight deal with

Anthony Joshua over the line. And this far from being the PR masterstroke that Kinnahen's been told it will be, that is really the moment when stuff starts to detonate for them, because American law enforcement are horrified that the heavyweight champion of the world. world is saying, I work for a gangster. Everyone suddenly realizes, okay, this is kind of gone too far now. We know who Daniel Kinahan is and we just can't, this can't go on for much longer. So that was not a PR masterstroke. That was in fact the moment of which everything starts to kind of detonate around Kinahan. And it kind of comes in concert somewhat with the Encro chat bust as well, right? So everything is sort of exploding and imploding at the same

time. Yeah, there's a lot of ructions in the criminal world at that point in time because you've got the Sky ECC, you've got the NECO bus, you have like the DEA suddenly like fascinated in this person, Daniel Kinnahen. You have also in the background, the Irish have went to the Americans to say, could we do something around sanctions, could we do something around like a reward for the capture of the Kenahehan so that all of those things are happening at the same time? And then eventually in 2022, a number of law enforcement officials from various different entities, including the American State Department and DEA, they were all gathered together in Dublin City Hall, and they announced sanctions against several members of the Kinnahen cartel, including Daniel Kinnahen.

And then they announced a $5 million reward for information leading to the capture of Danonee Kinnah, Kynnehan, Christa Kinehan, and Krista Kinnahen Jr. Yeah. And I think probably I thought from that moment on, I'd like to eventually write a piece about Daniel Kinhunham. Because I thought either he'll, he is going to get arrested or he won't. And either way is really interesting. Yeah, yeah. Like, you know, his younger kids go to a private school in Dubai and like, you know, what's the school gates chat like? Or is he a member of a golf club? I don't know. You know, it's a way that he has a kind of legitimate seeming life in Dubai still, and yet there's a wanted poster up for it. I've never quite been able to tally those two things.

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And remember, stay safe. Yeah, you mentioned that he's kind of well embedded with some of the power structures out there in Dubai and UAE. I just wanted to read another excerpt from your piece because it's just, it's so emblematic, I guess, of how crazily international this cocaine trade is now. And you mention a bust on September 26, 2023, which is the M.V. Matthew. So this is a freighter flying the Panamanian flag, I'm quoting you now, which was intercepted south of court by Irish Army Rangers. who fast wrote from a helicopter and arrested the crew. It was carrying more than two tons of cocaine. It's quite a lot of cocaine, which the crew had begun to set on fire as the Rangers boarded the ship.

The Garthai, that's the Irish police, believe that the smuggling attempt was arranged and co-financed by the Kinnahns, Colombia's Klanda Gulfo and Hezbollah operatives work based in Venezuela. According to testimony in Dublin Special Criminal Court, a Dutch man on board, Kumali Ozgen, served as the eyes and ears of the operation which was overseen from Dupé by. This criminal collective, one detective said, had immense capabilities and unlimited resources. And that's kind of the essence of it, really, isn't it? It's just unbelievably international.

It's almost literally everywhere on earth. Just listening to you read that back, it's almost psychedelic. I often think this about, if you dig deep enough in almost any of these big crimes, stories, there comes a moment like you get that, you get a paragraph like that, that you understand that it's kind of unconquerable, it's unbeatable, the war on drugs can't ever be won, and all, and I've felt that for a very long time doing this reporting, and every single story I do makes me feel it more, because that kind of global structure just can't be beaten, because there are always other people who will, you know, pop up to fill a gap. And frankly, they don't demand is so ridiculously high, there will always be a supplier to meet that demand.

I mean, you can make small victories along the way, but you can't beat that kind of network, like the one you just describes, the Hezbole guys in Venezuela are always going to find away. They'll find a way. Yeah, they're quite industrious. I think there was a clause in your piece on the Encro chat in SkyCC bus that was like, was it about the law enforcement trying to sort of fathom which languages people were speaking on the boats? And there was like Micronesian languages and there were Balkan languages and just like a crazy level of connection across the world. And something that law enforcement is always going to be sort of dragging its hills to try and follow, right? Yeah, it's difficult.

I think one of the advances in law enforcement has been much more international cooperation. I think the last, I can't remember the first time we sort of, touch base, but I guess I've been doing organized crime stories on and off for, you know, a few years now. And I've noticed the levels of international cooperation have really gone up. I think Anchorage SkyEC was a big part of that because lots of people needed a kind of central organizing, you know, module to be able to just deal with this, these, the terabytes of data that they'd gathered. And Europol was that. Europeol really came into its own during that period

because they were able to provide that kind of central node but I think since then you've seen police forces really like working with each other much much more closely and that makes sense because the criminals are all working internationally with each other much more closely but yeah you know people speaking Albanian on a boat in you know Panama or whatever it's that's the nature of the world

that's how it works. And so where are we with Daniel Kinnahann? What's his status now? Have members of his team been getting picked off by law enforcement? Or is he still pretty strong? Yeah, there's, I mean, there's, there have been a hell of a lot of arrests of people involved in the feud. It's something like 70 people have gone inside for stuff relating to that string of murders.

Sean McGovern was picked up in Dubai. there was a European arrest warrant out for him, there was a Interpol red notice, and eventually the Dubai police knocked on his door and arrested him. It takes quite a lot for them to do that, but they did it. He was extradited.

His trial will be next year, probably, but that was a massive moment. Yeah. Because he was the eyes and ears of the group. So I don't know what's going to happen. I was told that there is a kind of charging decision imminent with Daniel Kenan in Ireland, at which point arrest points could be issued. And then we'll see when the rubber hits the road,

whether the Emirates want to arrest him or not. What about you, Ed? I mean, are you staying on the organised crime beat? It's a pretty rich vein. It is a rich vein. I dot around, as you know, like I have some, you know, do other international stories. So I have something not crime related, but I'm doing something really, really, which is like completely fascinating, which is kind of Russia related, and which I'm really enjoying. And I'm, you know, also doing, you know, a couple of other little smaller bits.

But yeah, I can't imagine it's my last, you know, my last go. What I find really interesting, I think, more than the, let me, well, let me say that again. There is a, there is a, there is a whole world of podcasts and newspaper reporting and books, whatever, which, which focuses almost exclusively on the, like, lurid aspects of crime. So the more, you know, more graphic, the better and whatever, and this guy, whack this guy and whatever. The more gory the details, the better. You know, I find myself, not in like a kind of snobbish way, but I just find myself, I just get a little bit bored of that stuff sometimes. What I want to do is the thing that you want to know, which is that how does this stuff actually work? Yeah. And the ways in which the illicit world rubs up against the illicit world, that is like endlessly fascinating to me.

Like, so the boxing aspect of the story is interesting for me, not just because it's boxing, but because it offered a kind of legitimate way for Daniel Kinnon to be in the world, which cocaine trafficking did not. And it speaks to kind of quite evergreen human urges for legitimacy and to feel like you are standing in a world which people admire and so on. So all of those aspects of the story were actually the things that I found most interesting. I also, you come across like stories within stories in the Kinnahen piece, the Neapolitan prosecutor

who's been up and down to the prison where Imperialia is to take his confession and has that 3,000 pages worth that relationship was so fascinating to me. This guy who's a lovely man of about my age, who's driving up in this armored truck to a prison

to take the confession of this major criminal who's telling him everything and sitting opposite him just hearing all of the stuff that you've been thinking about for so long and hearing it from the horse's mouth. That to me was like one of the most rewarding bits of recording for this. So yes, but I don't think I've got, I mean, all of those interesting bits of crime will exist in a year's time, in two years' time, and three years' time.

It's just a question of what the story is that brings you back there. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm personally fascinated by that as well in the way that, I mean, illicit finance and sort of like financial networks that power all of this stuff as well. That's like, and they pop up, they bubble up through the surface in, I don't know, casinos and major sort of business deals and things like this. It's a similar kind of story to the boxing, right? It's where it's almost like a thermal vent that it finds its way to the surface somewhere,

but you'd never quite know when it's going to spurt out. Totally agree. And thermal vent, I'm going to steal. You're welcome. Well, Ed, thanks ever so much for joining me. I guess it's the evening there. It's morning here, usual New Zealand time zone nightmare. But yeah, I guess we'll check in with you in another two or three years

when you write another huge expose on one of the world's biggest criminals. That'd be a great pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks so much. Cheers. Cheers. your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly

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