Speaker 1: Pushkin.
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Speaker 2: p per month. Currently only available on iOS. There's a
Speaker 2: link in the show notes. Previously on Hot Money, Christy
Speaker 2: Kinahan used an exploding European drug market to grow a
Speaker 2: tiny Dublin heroin hustle into a cocaine empire operating across
Speaker 2: the continent. In this episode, we learn about a big
Speaker 2: shift in its criminal strategy. It's a turning point that
Speaker 2: tells us something new about the evolution of international organized crime.
Speaker 2: Happens on the Costa del Soul. It's early in the
Speaker 2: morning on May twenty fifth, twenty ten, and Christi Kinahan's
Speaker 2: fast asleep in his bed. He's now living in a
Speaker 2: quiet neighborhood in Marbeya, on the southern coast of Spain.
Speaker 2: The streets aligned with white imperial style.
Speaker 1: Villas and at this hour they're empty. Suddenly police swarm
Speaker 1: into the property.
Speaker 2: There's a video of this moment and it shows armed
Speaker 2: officers with battering rams, dressed in riot gear and within
Speaker 2: minutes he's in handcuffs, face down on his bedroom floor
Speaker 2: and still wearing his striped underpants. It would be a
Speaker 2: pretty bad start to the day for anyone, but it's
Speaker 2: about to get a lot worse. Over seven hundred police
Speaker 2: officers raid companies and residential properties in the UK, Spain, Belgium, Cypress,
Speaker 2: Brazil and Island in a joint operation run from command
Speaker 2: centers in Malagar Lund than in Dublin. Hours later, Spain's
Speaker 2: Interior Minister speaks to news agency A. He says they've
Speaker 2: brought down a mafia that's linked to multiple murders. And
Speaker 2: it's in that moment Christie pinned to the floor in
Speaker 2: his pants, surrounded by riot police that you can imagine
Speaker 2: he thought this time the game might finally be up.
Speaker 2: I'm Miles Johnson and from the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries.
Speaker 1: This is Hot Money, Season two, The New.
Speaker 2: Narcos Episode three, Sun Guns and Sangria. As far back
Speaker 2: as the nineteen sixties, the Costa has had this magnetic
Speaker 2: appeal for two very different types of people, retirees looking
Speaker 2: to see out their days under the Spanish sun and
Speaker 2: hardened gagsters. Think of it as a bit like Florida,
Speaker 2: but for Brits and Irish people. It's a place where
Speaker 2: sun burned men play rounds of golf, expats sit in
Speaker 2: shamrock themed pubs, sipping on warm pints of guinness, or
Speaker 2: watching soccer matches on plasma TVs. It's also a place where,
Speaker 2: if you've got the money, you can relax in beautiful
Speaker 2: villas by the pool, mixed with minor celebrities and eat
Speaker 2: in Michelin starred restaurants. And by twenty ten, this is
Speaker 2: where Christy Kinahan had decided to base his cocaine trafficking business, and.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just because he liked the weather, the costa.
Speaker 2: It's a bit like Amsterdam, but with more sun and
Speaker 2: better Sangria.
Speaker 3: They've got all the lifestyle benefits there with other expat villains.
Speaker 3: For one of a better word, it's a great networking
Speaker 3: opportunity to put distance between an organized criminal and the
Speaker 3: markets where they're basically selling their commodities and where the
Speaker 3: crimes are happening, so it becomes a bit of a hub.
Speaker 2: Matt Horn recently retired from the UK's National Crime Agency,
Speaker 2: where he was the Deputy Director of Investigations. He's now
Speaker 2: Director of Intelligence and Investigation at Clue Software. But he
Speaker 2: started out as a bobby on the beat dealing with
Speaker 2: the sort of problems the typical of any big city.
Speaker 3: Addiction, exploitation, violent crime, robbery, all that kind of thing,
Speaker 3: which a lot of those have got their roots in
Speaker 3: things like Class A drugs trade, in firearms trade. Ultimately,
Speaker 3: you know, behind all of that is organized crime, and
Speaker 3: I sort of became aware of that, I think at
Speaker 3: quite an early stage in my career that actually what
Speaker 3: was really kind of motivating me and was interesting me
Speaker 3: most was actually what was sitting behind it? Who are
Speaker 3: the people that are profiting from this?
Speaker 2: In two thousand and six, matt joined the UK's Serious
Speaker 2: Organized Crime Agency SOAKA, it was the predecessor to the NCAA.
Speaker 3: Looking to identify who are the subjects of interest that
Speaker 3: were causing the most harm in the UK.
Speaker 1: When did you come across the CANAANDSA?
Speaker 3: So that was at that time. I became aware of
Speaker 3: them from probably as early as two thousand and six.
Speaker 3: The information that we were working on and developing intelligence
Speaker 3: around was their potential involvement in drug trafficking, firearms, money laundering.
Speaker 3: The assessment that we were making at the time was
Speaker 3: that they really were at the top of the tree
Speaker 3: rubbing shoulders with really the highest level criminals from other
Speaker 3: countries doing similar things.
Speaker 2: According to police documents, Christy is now moving large loads
Speaker 2: of cocaine through Europe. He starts raking in more money
Speaker 2: than ever before, and like all gangsters, if he's going
Speaker 2: to spend and invest that money, he needs to find
Speaker 2: a way to launder it, because it's not always easy
Speaker 2: to move dirty cash into the legitimate economy. There are
Speaker 2: Spanish police reports from the time. They give me a
Speaker 2: sort of fascinating insight into Christie's criminal mind his business mind,
Speaker 2: to be more accurate, because he starts to come up
Speaker 2: with a bunch of pretty creative schemes. One of them
Speaker 2: involves buying up bits of chicken and pork in Europe
Speaker 2: and selling them at a profit in China. He tries
Speaker 2: to get into trading gold in Columbia and buying up
Speaker 2: land for development near the Amazon in Brazil. Not all
Speaker 2: of these capers work out. He tries and fails to
Speaker 2: buy up landfill sites in the UK, and he even
Speaker 2: explores acquiring a pharmaceuticals company to move cocaine around the
Speaker 2: world disguised as medical exports, but that never gets off
Speaker 2: the ground. But some of his schemes do work, and
Speaker 2: Christie's real business savvy.
Speaker 1: It starts to show up.
Speaker 2: In the next movie makes because once his own money
Speaker 2: laundering operations are up and running, he starts to offer
Speaker 2: the service to other criminals. The South coast of Spain
Speaker 2: at this time is awash with gangsters. That's the Russian mafia,
Speaker 2: Latin American cartels, and dark African criminals all hanging out
Speaker 2: in restaurants and golf courses. And if Christy can charge
Speaker 2: the others a fee to launder their cash, then you
Speaker 2: can find another way to make cleaning his own money
Speaker 2: not a cost but a profit center. It's sort of
Speaker 2: like a criminal version of Amazon Web Services, you know
Speaker 2: the story of how Amazon turned a huge cost base
Speaker 2: it's millions of servers into a service so that it
Speaker 2: could rent out to others. But while Christie's growing his operations,
Speaker 2: the police in Spain Island and the UK, they're watching
Speaker 2: they're doing the sort of painstaking work that's needed in
Speaker 2: these kinds of complex cross border investigations.
Speaker 3: If you're going to go after the higher level people
Speaker 3: that sit behind, it takes a lot of time, and
Speaker 3: you're following them around, you're gathering all sorts of data
Speaker 3: with intelligence and information around them. Doesn't sound like the
Speaker 3: most exciting part of it, managing the data and the information,
Speaker 3: But that's the thing that when you get to court,
Speaker 3: it's going to undermine you if you haven't done it properly,
Speaker 3: because you're up against pole who are highly funded, extremely motivated,
Speaker 3: very experienced in their trade craft as organized criminals. By
Speaker 3: the time you've got one of these high level players
Speaker 3: before the court, you've generally got extremely damning evidence. But
Speaker 3: what they will do is employ these very high powered,
Speaker 3: very expensive, and very smart and intelligent barristers to try
Speaker 3: and attack the integrity of how you did the investigation.
Speaker 2: It sounds like sort of like a chess match, like
Speaker 2: you're almost having to think multiple stages ahead. Yes, Christy
Speaker 2: knows how to play this game too. He realizes that
Speaker 2: there's a pretty good chance of the police attracking him,
Speaker 2: so him and his men they develop elaborate ways of
Speaker 2: switching between different phones to try and avoid being wiretapped.
Speaker 2: And they even start to hire private security companies to
Speaker 2: give them training and counter surveillance and learning how to
Speaker 2: spot if they're being tailed. And they were right to
Speaker 2: be careful, because on that morning in May twenty ten,
Speaker 2: with Christy snoozing in its bed, it all comes crashing down,
Speaker 2: this huge multi country effort to take down the Kinnerhans.
Speaker 2: It's called Operation Shovel.
Speaker 3: There were seams that I was working with that were
Speaker 3: carrying out activity in the UK, carrying out searches and
Speaker 3: recovering evidence. You know, obviously very closely in touch with
Speaker 3: what was happening on the continent, so that everything was
Speaker 3: synchronized and happened, you know, at the same time. You know,
Speaker 3: if you're running the UK part of this investigation, this
Speaker 3: is part of the culmination of that. Really, when when
Speaker 3: your international partners are going to arrest the top echelon
Speaker 3: of the crime.
Speaker 2: Group, Operation Shovel reveals a crime empire of mind boggling scale.
Speaker 2: It's this network of accountants, phony, corporate directors and advisors
Speaker 2: which make up the Kinnerhan's money laundering machine. More than
Speaker 2: two hundred companies are involved. There's a property empire that
Speaker 2: spans from Britain to Brazil with hundreds of millions of euros.
Speaker 2: The uk is Serious Organized Crime Agency calls it a
Speaker 2: global investment sir for gangsters. In the list of countries
Speaker 2: where this money moves, it's endless Belgium, Holland, France, Cyprus, Greece, Latvia, Poland, Gibraltar, Switzerland, Lichenstein.
Speaker 2: And that's just in Europe. The money also moves through Morocco,
Speaker 2: South Africa, China, Dubai, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, and
Speaker 2: the United States. There's a mountain of evidence against a
Speaker 2: Kinahan organization and it looks to be enough to put
Speaker 2: them behind bars for decades. Dozens of alleged Kinnehan associates
Speaker 2: are arrested, and so's Christi and his sons Daniel and
Speaker 2: Christopher Junior. And as they're being taken away must have
Speaker 2: dawned on Christy that this time, perhaps it really was
Speaker 2: all over.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I'm sure you've seen the footage.
Speaker 2: There's like the Spanish police released video footage of Christy
Speaker 2: Kinahan by them raiding his property and being on handcuffs
Speaker 2: and stuff are in.
Speaker 1: What did you think of that moment?
Speaker 3: Yes, so there's certainly a sense when you become aware
Speaker 3: and see that sort of footage, this feels like a
Speaker 3: big stage. This could be the beginning of the end
Speaker 3: for the organized crime group. It's a rewarding time, I
Speaker 3: suppose if you're an investigator and you're part of a
Speaker 3: global investigation to see the top end of the organized
Speaker 3: crime group in handcuffs being led out by armed Spanish officers.
Speaker 3: But of course you can never really know what's going
Speaker 3: to happen until the ice stop wrolling, if you like.
Speaker 2: Back in Ireland, the media has been keeping a close
Speaker 2: eye on the events unfolding in Spain, including journalist Nicola Talent.
Speaker 2: She's investigations editor for the Irish newspaper The Sunday World.
Speaker 2: Nicola is one of a small group of less Irish
Speaker 2: reporters who's been writing about the Kinnahan family for years,
Speaker 2: and she's one of the best. She's actually written a
Speaker 2: book about them called Clash of the Clans.
Speaker 4: They seem to have always been there in the ether.
Speaker 4: To be honest with.
Speaker 2: You, Nicola reported on the Kinnahans as they built their
Speaker 2: base in the Spanish Costa in the two thousands, but
Speaker 2: after Operation Shovel, Nichola says, a lot of people in
Speaker 2: Ireland thought the Kinnahans were over.
Speaker 4: In the aftermath of that, you know, I think everybody
Speaker 4: believed that they had been finished, they were done.
Speaker 2: But Nicola is not so sure. So she's not surprised
Speaker 2: when Christy gets out of jail.
Speaker 4: You know, despite this Operation Shovel, they were very much
Speaker 4: back in business.
Speaker 2: So how is that possible that, you know, you can
Speaker 2: be running an organized crime organization which is sort of
Speaker 2: then busted for being worth you know, one hundred million euros,
Speaker 2: and yet pretty soon after you're back they.
Speaker 4: Had money, They had good lawyers. They have the money
Speaker 4: to employ plenty of counter surveiller to start purchasing these
Speaker 4: encrypted phones, to you know, to keep on the move,
Speaker 4: to have safe houses, to have many layers between them
Speaker 4: and their products. So the bigger you get, the more
Speaker 4: difficult it is for law enforcement to bring down a grouping.
Speaker 2: Because after the initial drama of the raids dies down,
Speaker 2: it becomes apparent to the Spanish police that convicting Christie
Speaker 2: is going to be far harder than they thought. The
Speaker 2: paper trail for all these front companies is huge, and
Speaker 2: the police need to get countries around the world to
Speaker 2: send over documents to prove that they belong to Christie,
Speaker 2: but this takes years. In some countries they don't even
Speaker 2: reply to the request for help, and like Matt Horn said,
Speaker 2: these cases are delicate things. Without the right paper trail,
Speaker 2: they can fall apart. Christine his sons are released on
Speaker 2: bail and return to their luxury villas, and one by one,
Speaker 2: the most serious charges against them they fall away. Police
Speaker 2: across Europe they're left furious. This was meant to be
Speaker 2: a knockout blow, an operation that would finally bring Christie down,
Speaker 2: and now the case is collapsing before their eyes. For
Speaker 2: Matt Horn, the man in charge of tracking the Kinner
Speaker 2: Hands for the UK's National Crime Agency, it was a
Speaker 2: sign that they had to double down on their efforts.
Speaker 3: So it's not unusual in my trade to accept the
Speaker 3: fact that you might have lost this particular battle. But
Speaker 3: the war, if you like, I fucking use that metaphor,
Speaker 3: carries on.
Speaker 2: And it looks like there will be more battles to come.
Speaker 2: Because Nikola, she thinks that Operation Shovel didn't just fail
Speaker 2: to stop the Kinner Hands She thinks it galvanized them.
Speaker 4: It was no longer just you know, a press, that
Speaker 4: they could beat the system, that they were bigger than
Speaker 4: the law. This was the reality of it. So it
Speaker 4: made them very, very powerful within their own world and
Speaker 4: made them feel that way even more so than before.
Speaker 4: They haven't actually been stopped. And if they were at
Speaker 4: worth one hundred million in twenty ten, they're now bigger
Speaker 4: than that. So what are they worth? What are these
Speaker 4: guys capable of? Where are they going next? So we
Speaker 4: just decided to go out to Spain to see what
Speaker 4: we could get.
Speaker 2: In May twenty twelve, Niccola gets on a plane with
Speaker 2: a team from her newspaper. They head out to the
Speaker 2: cost of Del Soul. The plan is to pose as
Speaker 2: Irish tourists who are interested in buying a luxury villa there,
Speaker 2: but really they want to show that the Kinahans, far
Speaker 2: from being destroyed, are actually back in business and stronger
Speaker 2: than before. A few days into Nicola's undercover reporting trip,
Speaker 2: she's making some progress. They've gathered evidence that despite the
Speaker 2: police operation, the Kinahans still have several luxury properties out
Speaker 2: in the Costa.
Speaker 1: But there's something else that Niccola and her team want
Speaker 1: while they're here, We.
Speaker 4: Did want to see Christy Kinahan if we could. We
Speaker 4: wanted to see activity around Port of bernoose around that port.
Speaker 2: Porto Bernus is a Spanish town close to Marbea, and
Speaker 2: Nicola already knew from her sources that this was the
Speaker 2: place that the Kinahans liked to hang out. She'd been
Speaker 2: told about their daily habits.
Speaker 4: Because human beings, no matter how much counter surveillance training
Speaker 4: you get, most of them are routines, and they've all
Speaker 4: back into routine, especially when they feel safe. So they
Speaker 4: had kind of fallen back into this sort of peacock
Speaker 4: way of behaving that they were showing off.
Speaker 2: The next step is to try and get a photo
Speaker 2: of Christi. The team wait for hours hoping to catch sight.
Speaker 1: Of him, and it works. He palls by in a
Speaker 1: large black Mercedes.
Speaker 4: We watched him move around a bit and photographed him.
Speaker 4: I think at that point was probably the first time
Speaker 4: he'd ever been photographed outside of a court, and he
Speaker 4: didn't know he was being photographed, So he was behaving
Speaker 4: very naturally and people were behaving very naturally with him.
Speaker 4: When he walked into a pub, a group stood and
Speaker 4: were only sort of kissing the ring on his It
Speaker 4: was very Godfather's style behavior from him and from others.
Speaker 4: We had it in the bag and we decided to
Speaker 4: go for a drink in one of the busy pubs
Speaker 4: down in Port Banous to celebrate a successful mission.
Speaker 2: I suppose it's called the port Sidebar. It's lit with
Speaker 2: pink and purple neon lights and decorated with old fashioned
Speaker 2: diving helmets. It's got a lot of TVs on the wall,
Speaker 2: and it's summer and packed, and they just looked like
Speaker 2: another group of holidaymakers enjoying a pine.
Speaker 4: Just not long after we sat down, one of the
Speaker 4: people working with me got up and went into a
Speaker 4: loo and he came back out and he just said
Speaker 4: to me to move go and he said back see
Speaker 4: you back the villa. Myself and my colleague Mick McCaffrey
Speaker 4: were told to separate. We'd be shadowed and just to
Speaker 4: basically keep moving. Mick went one way, I went the other.
Speaker 4: We walked through the crowds and headed for the gates
Speaker 4: of the port, where I managed to just hop inn
Speaker 4: at taxi and get back to the villa we were staying,
Speaker 4: and Mick arrived shortly after me.
Speaker 2: When everyone's safe, they find out what happened. Their colleague
Speaker 2: had spotted someone in the bar who looked like he
Speaker 2: might be a dealer, and this potential dealer was staring
Speaker 2: at Nikola. So nicholas colleague had followed the man into
Speaker 2: the bathroom and he heard him speaking on the phone.
Speaker 4: Telling whoever was on the other end of the phone
Speaker 4: that Nicola Talent and the Sunderworld were here, send the
Speaker 4: lads down, and he'd made the quick decision to get
Speaker 4: us out of there. And to me, it just showed
Speaker 4: how untouchable they felt they were. I mean, they weren't
Speaker 4: sending the lads, as he calls them down, to just
Speaker 4: have a little look at us. They were obviously going
Speaker 4: to try and isolate us. And you know, I'd say,
Speaker 4: give us a bit of a fright.
Speaker 2: I mean, did you think that in that moment there
Speaker 2: was ever a risk that they would take the risk
Speaker 2: of doing something serious to you?
Speaker 4: But there was a course, you know, that's a course
Speaker 4: what it was. And that's how they had become and
Speaker 4: felt as untouchable at that point down on the caster,
Speaker 4: That's how dangerous they had become.
Speaker 2: While she's in the Costa Nikola isn't only looking out
Speaker 2: for Christy Kinahan, She's also very interested in his elder son, Daniel,
Speaker 2: because Operation Shovel had revealed some important new information about
Speaker 2: the Kinahans. It showed that Daniel was taking on more
Speaker 2: and more responsibility in the group. It's a classic, almost
Speaker 2: cliched crime tale. Christie the patriarch, the godfather wanting to
Speaker 2: groom his own blood to succeed him, and on the
Speaker 2: face of it, Daniel appeared like a good candidate to
Speaker 2: take over the family business. In twenty ten, he's still
Speaker 2: mostly unknown and surprisingly he has no criminal convictions. To
Speaker 2: someone looking in from the outside, he could have appeared
Speaker 2: like a legitimate businessman. While she was in the Costa,
Speaker 2: Nicola discovered something else about Daniel Kinahan.
Speaker 1: He wasn't keeping in the shadows just like his dad.
Speaker 2: Daniel was a bit of a show off and he
Speaker 2: was busy.
Speaker 1: He seemed to want to become a public figure.
Speaker 2: Because out in Spain, Daniel's become very involved in a boxing.
Speaker 4: Gym, kind of an underground thing. It looks a bit gratty,
Speaker 4: to be honest, which it was down a kind of
Speaker 4: a driveway just into an underground gym thing.
Speaker 2: He's managing low level fighters, arranging their training and arranging
Speaker 2: their fights. There's this video of Daniel from back then
Speaker 2: on the YouTube site of Acrobat TV. It's at a
Speaker 2: boxing match in Marbeya in twenty thirteen. Daniel's in the
Speaker 2: ring and he's standing in the trainer's corner wearing a
Speaker 2: red cap and a T shirt.
Speaker 1: And his compair comes out wearing.
Speaker 2: A tuxedo and he starts calling out the names of
Speaker 2: the fighters and Daniel starts punching the air and the
Speaker 2: two boxes are limbering.
Speaker 1: Up with a big chest here and I can.
Speaker 2: Excellent about five minutes into this fight, he's in the ring.
Speaker 2: He's in the corner with this fighter and he's screaming
Speaker 2: into his face, pumping him up, and the commentators referring
Speaker 2: to him as Danny.
Speaker 3: Danny's telling him off there, giving him the right act.
Speaker 1: This match.
Speaker 2: It's just a local event, but within a couple of
Speaker 2: years things have started to change a lot. The boxing
Speaker 2: gym Daniel co founds is originally called MGM and is
Speaker 2: later renamed MTK. It goes from a tiny gym in
Speaker 2: Spain to running high profile events. Daniel's now walking boxes
Speaker 2: up into the ring at big fights in Dublin.
Speaker 4: He was walking them up as their you know, their manager,
Speaker 4: and was being cheered by a crowd of up to
Speaker 4: eight thousand And when you think about it, that was
Speaker 4: only a couple of years after operations shovel.
Speaker 2: Daniel's boxing company begins to embrace social media. They start
Speaker 2: to arrange photo opportunities with celebrities and Premier league footballers.
Speaker 4: And none of those things happen by chance. They're all planned.
Speaker 4: There's advice, this high end corporate advice given to them.
Speaker 4: I mean, be under no illusion. They have their own
Speaker 4: marketing department, They have their own pre teams working for
Speaker 4: them in the same way as any wealthy, prosperous company
Speaker 4: in the legitimate world.
Speaker 2: Why did biggas in the boxing world sort of so
Speaker 2: quickly accept someone like Daniel Kinahan into their sort of circles?
Speaker 1: You know, how did he achieve that so fast?
Speaker 4: Look he was bringing with the fabulous wealth and back
Speaker 4: from the beginning he was signing up boxers to what
Speaker 4: was essentially in nirvana in Spain. These were boxers who
Speaker 4: would never have made it as professionals. They were amateur
Speaker 4: boxers who loved their sport and who you know dreamed
Speaker 4: of fame. And not only were you been offered a
Speaker 4: contract coaches nutritionalness, they were being given accommodation in Spain,
Speaker 4: they were moving their whole families out to the coster.
Speaker 4: They were being put up in beautiful villains with swimming pools,
Speaker 4: so they were being completely love bombed, and they were
Speaker 4: being separated from everything they once knew, probably the decent
Speaker 4: volunteers in the communities who had trained them since they
Speaker 4: were children, and who had brought them and would have
Speaker 4: brought them on to as honest a level as they
Speaker 4: could have. They were believing that they'd been badly treated previously,
Speaker 4: they'd been badly paid, they'd been cheated on, that this
Speaker 4: was what they deserved, and that only Daniel Kinahan could
Speaker 4: give it to them.
Speaker 2: I wonder what you think that tells us about Daniel
Speaker 2: Kinahan as a person, in the sense of it suggests
Speaker 2: to me that he must he must have been pretty
Speaker 2: charismatic and had a sort of an ability to really
Speaker 2: charm and win the confidence of people. Is there anything
Speaker 2: that strikes you terms of his personality, in terms of
Speaker 2: what might give him an advantage in the world of
Speaker 2: boxing and self publicity or the world of forging alliances
Speaker 2: in international organized crime.
Speaker 4: Well, it's a manipulative character because he starts off being
Speaker 4: very charming and very nice, and suddenly you find yourself
Speaker 4: on your own with them, and you realize you're being
Speaker 4: threatened from somebody who didn't think was capable of it.
Speaker 4: You thought you were his friend, but you're.
Speaker 1: Not that Daniel's not only thinking about boxing.
Speaker 2: The Spanish police file it describes Daniel as the person
Speaker 2: in charge of what it calls slightly euphemistically hard decisions.
Speaker 2: It's a reminder that while he's carefully building his name
Speaker 2: in the world of boxing, Daniel's also helping his father
Speaker 2: build a criminal empire.
Speaker 4: All criminals ultimately wish and aim for becoming legitimate, transitioning
Speaker 4: into legitimate businessmen.
Speaker 2: Daniel now has one foot in both worlds, but he's
Speaker 2: about to learn that keeping these two lives separate is impossible,
Speaker 2: and soon he'll be forced to choose between them.
Speaker 1: I'm looking at this unbelievable CCTV footage. It's chilling.
Speaker 2: It's from twenty sixteen from a hotel in a Dublin suburb,
Speaker 2: and it's become one of the most notorious moments in
Speaker 2: modern Irish criminal history. The pictures show what looks like
Speaker 2: three armed policemen in emergency response uniforms pacing down a hallway.
Speaker 2: They're entering and exiting rooms holding automatic weapons. But these
Speaker 2: men aren't policemen. They're assassins and they've come to the
Speaker 2: hotel to murder Daniel Kinahan. There's a promotional event for
Speaker 2: a boxing match at the hotel that day. There's a
Speaker 2: crowd and they're watching the fighters flex their muscles and
Speaker 2: grimace at each other. But suddenly are men burst into
Speaker 2: the room and begin to shoot. People are screaming and
Speaker 2: they're rushing for the exits. Someone in the room films
Speaker 2: what's happening on their phone. They flee into a back alley.
Speaker 5: I was at a murder investigation and a meeting in
Speaker 5: a conference in relation to it, and I came out
Speaker 5: and I got a phone call and I shortly afterwards
Speaker 5: went to the scene.
Speaker 2: Mikeroy Sullivan is the Irish detective who first arrested Christy
Speaker 2: Kinahan way back in the nineteen eighties. Now he's chief superintendent.
Speaker 5: Running organized crime investigations for the country and running murder
Speaker 5: investigations as well. Yeah, it didn't sound as bad when
Speaker 5: somebody's telling you on the phone there's a couple of
Speaker 5: guys here with machine guns, and you know, trying to
Speaker 5: get my head around it. It's only when you go
Speaker 5: there and you look at the CCTV. You have three
Speaker 5: guys dressed with bulletproof vests that purporting to be policemen,
Speaker 5: wearing helmets, bulletproof helmets and carrying AK forty seven's going
Speaker 5: into a packed hotel in Dublin City to do it
Speaker 5: in the middle of the day, To have the audacity
Speaker 5: to have this military style, well planned operation. At that stage,
Speaker 5: I had forty years in law enforcement and I hadn't
Speaker 5: seen the likes of that since the IRA. You know,
Speaker 5: it was a milestone in law enforcement terms, certainly in Ireland.
Speaker 5: Those guys could have appeared anywhere. They could have appeared
Speaker 5: at an airport, at a police station, at a shopping center.
Speaker 5: You know, they could have done what they liked for
Speaker 5: those couple of minutes, for ten minutes, whatever, And you
Speaker 5: realize things are never going to be the same again.
Speaker 5: And you also realize we are in a different league.
Speaker 5: This isn't a few, this is the war.
Speaker 2: At the hotel, the scene is gruesome. Several people had
Speaker 2: been shot and one man's dead, but somehow Daniel Kinahan's
Speaker 2: managed to slip away. Irish police get intelligence that the
Speaker 2: attempted assassination was an act of revenge for a murder
Speaker 2: back in Spain that the Kinahans had carried out against
Speaker 2: a former ally. But Daniel Kinahan was still alive, and
Speaker 2: the question was how is he going to react. Gangles
Speaker 2: are bad for business, but this was a brazen challenge
Speaker 2: to the authority of his family on their home turf,
Speaker 2: The heir to his father's crime empire. The man who'd
Speaker 2: been trying to appear like a regular legal boxing entrepreneur
Speaker 2: now faced perhaps the biggest decision of his life. Nicola
Speaker 2: Talent thinks there was never much of a question about
Speaker 2: what Daniel would do.
Speaker 4: His ego was challenged. He's a nurse, says, he's all
Speaker 4: those things that we know of human beings having the
Speaker 4: capabilities of being, and his power was challenged here in Dublin,
Speaker 4: and he was going to lash out and make sure
Speaker 4: everyone knew who he was, what he was capable of.
Speaker 5: I think it took two days. A guy called Eddie Hutch,
Speaker 5: who was a family member of a particular group, who
Speaker 5: was suspected to be on the other behind the attack,
Speaker 5: was murdered at his home. He was shot dead. He
Speaker 5: was a taxi driver, looked the gloves were off.
Speaker 2: Soon murders were being carried out in broad daylight on
Speaker 2: the streets of Dublin.
Speaker 5: It didn't matter what you were involved in crime. People
Speaker 5: were shot because they attended funerals, they were seen talking
Speaker 5: with members of the other family, and the other family
Speaker 5: of quite a large family scattered throughout the city. So
Speaker 5: people were shot on suspicion of knowing or being friendly
Speaker 5: with people who had no hand act their part in crime.
Speaker 5: For many years, people who were soft targets. People were
Speaker 5: shot because it might inflict pain on the other group.
Speaker 2: Michael and his colleagues in the Organized Crime Squad try
Speaker 2: and contain the violence.
Speaker 5: You get as proactive as possible. It's very it's you
Speaker 5: get as many armed people as quick as possible to
Speaker 5: blanket a certain area. You put protection on the other
Speaker 5: group who are targets, and you try and put as
Speaker 5: much protection as possible. But it is very difficult to
Speaker 5: prevent somebody from getting shot because you don't know which
Speaker 5: somebody is going to be shot. And you work down
Speaker 5: who are the higher profile targets, and you try to
Speaker 5: you put policemen outside the door, you put policemen following them,
Speaker 5: you give them advice. You'd you basically try and protect
Speaker 5: as many people as possible while at the same time
Speaker 5: trying to solve the murders that has already taken place.
Speaker 5: And it's very challenging, it's very dangerous of knife age stuff,
Speaker 5: and you didn't know who was going to turn up
Speaker 5: with a gun at any given time to shoot any
Speaker 5: given person, and there was no rhyme nor reason to it.
Speaker 5: It was like all of these bounty hunters running around
Speaker 5: trying to make a name for themselves by shooting people
Speaker 5: and getting paid for it.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: I mean it sounds like a very yeah, like a
Speaker 2: very very intense moment.
Speaker 1: Intense.
Speaker 2: In the two years following the Regency Hotel attack, a
Speaker 2: total of eighteen people will be murdered and the Irish
Speaker 2: police will foil over forty other assassination attempts by the Kinahans.
Speaker 2: Michael had been playing a game of Cops and Robbers
Speaker 2: with Christie since they both started out in Dublin in
Speaker 2: their twenties. He'd seen how the Kinahan. Patcharck operated how
Speaker 2: he'd learned to try and not attract too much attention.
Speaker 2: But now his son, Daniel, the man being groomed as
Speaker 2: his heir, was putting everything his father had worked for
Speaker 2: at risk.
Speaker 5: Successful criminals who run organized crime groups should know one
Speaker 5: golden rule. You can't go around shooting people and not
Speaker 5: get police attention. And the smart move is to keep
Speaker 5: a low profile. The smart move is to negotiate yourself
Speaker 5: around things. Some criminals the power goes to their head,
Speaker 5: and the coke sometimes goes through their head too, but
Speaker 5: the power goes to that and they do things because
Speaker 5: they can. But the smart ones figure it out strategically
Speaker 5: and say, if I draw attention to myself, I don't
Speaker 5: know where this will go, but the institutions of the
Speaker 5: state will focus on me. There are consequences. You cannot
Speaker 5: go round like al Capone. You can, but you'll only
Speaker 5: last so long.
Speaker 2: And in the UK, Matt Horne and the National Crime
Speaker 2: Agency have been following everything the Kinnahans have been doing
Speaker 2: since Operation Shovel.
Speaker 3: You've got this extreme violence taking place, this criminal vendetta
Speaker 3: that's going on for a long period of time. Shootings murders.
Speaker 3: You've got this sports washing, they're kind of infiltrating effectively
Speaker 3: a global sport and becoming a major player in a
Speaker 3: global sport. As organized criminals, you've got the major money laundering,
Speaker 3: they've got the huge involvement in the global drugs trade.
Speaker 3: So yeah, you are starting to think that this is
Speaker 3: a major group and a group that we need still
Speaker 3: to do something about. And we've not managed to successfully
Speaker 3: prosecute them so far, So what else can we do
Speaker 3: to try and disrupt them?
Speaker 2: Daniel Kinahan he'd made his choice. Island was too dangerous,
Speaker 2: and Spain too. If the police didn't get them, then
Speaker 2: their rivals would. So they do what every serious gangster
Speaker 2: across Europe was doing at the time. They decide to
Speaker 2: move to a place far away, even further than the Costa,
Speaker 2: to one of the last places on Earth where they
Speaker 2: could expand their crime empire in peace.
Speaker 6: Dubai is like a membrane the sort of rackish waters
Speaker 6: of the underworld, and the murky waters sort of percolate
Speaker 6: and mingle with the fresh water of the rules based
Speaker 6: international financial system, and.
Speaker 2: It's where the supercartel will be born. Hot money is
Speaker 2: a production of the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries. It
Speaker 2: was written and reported by me Miles Johnson, and if
Speaker 2: you've got any leads or information about this story, you
Speaker 2: can email me at new narcost ft dot com. The
Speaker 2: series producer is Peggy Sutton. Edith Russolo is the associate producer.
Speaker 2: Fact checking is by Arthur Gompertz. Jason Gambrell and Amanda
Speaker 2: k Wong are the mixing engineers. Sound design from Jake Gorsky.
Speaker 2: Jeremy Walmsley wrote the original music. Our editor is Sarah Nix,
Speaker 2: and the executive producers are Jacob Goldstein and Cheryl Brumley.
Speaker 2: Special thanks to Laura Clark, Alistair Mackie Green Turner, Arley
Speaker 2: Adlington and Pablo dis Almoghera