In April this year Irish mobster Daniel Kinahan was arrested in Dubai. The 48-year-old’s capture was part of a months-long bi-lateral collaboration between Irish and United Arab Emirates officials to apprehend one of the world’s most wanted alleged criminals.
Now facing extradition back to Ireland to face charges including directing a criminal organisation, Daniel Kinahan’s past is coming back to bite him.
Authorities allege he and his father, Christy Kinahan, directed a $1.5 billion international cartel that ran narcotics, money laundering, and an extortion network which began decades ago.
Chilling rise
The Kinahan Organised Crime Group was established by Daniel’s father Christy Kinahan, a Dublin native, during the late 1990s. Christy’s jaw-dropping criminal record stretches back to the late 1970s and includes housebreaking, vehicle theft, burglary, receiving stolen property and forgery.
The organisation allegedly started as a street gang of inner-city narcotics dealers in Dublin, but rapidly expanded on an international scale to become the multi-million pound criminal enterprise that exists today.
Christy operated as the head honcho until the role was transferred to Daniel. Irish courts have since determined that the group constitutes a murderous organisation engaged in the international smuggling of narcotics and weapons.
The hierarchy of the criminal gang started with Christy and Daniel, with Daniel’s brother Christopher Kinahan Jnr.
Elsewhere were veteran Dublin-born criminal Bernard Clancy, Daniel’s “advisor and closest confidant” Sean McGovern, former KOCG enforcer now Marbella-based money launderer “Johnny Cash” Morrissey and Ian Dixon.
Despite the US imposing sanctions on the group in April 2022, it was reported in August 2022 that Spanish-based associates of the Kinahan cartel were continuing to orchestrate multi-million-euro drug operations.
In February 2023, a swoop on premises in the Long Mile Road area of Dublin resulted in the confiscation of equipment, the detention of eight individuals and 40 kg of cocaine. More than 2,000 containers of nitric oxide were recovered, alongside €78,000 in cash, a hydraulic drugs press, communications devices, mixing agent and a money counter.
The Kinahan cartel had been residing openly and conducting their activities from Dubai, benefiting from the protection that the city provides to organised crime syndicates.
But it wasn’t only drugs that the Kinahans were known for. Between 2015 and 2018, their H feud with the Hutch crime family resulted in the deaths of 18 people.
The arrest of cartel kingpin Daniel Kinahan may have taken place in Dubai, but it was masterminded in Ireland.
Valued at no less than €1.5 billion (£1.3 billion), the cartel has been blamed for 20 murders in Ireland, Spain and across Europe, and is now under unprecedented scrutiny.
This pressure comes from an extensive and unyielding campaign against them by the gardai, which kicked off late in the evening of 5 February 2016. Just hours earlier, the Hutch Organised Crime Gang had tried to take out Kinahan in a bold daylight attack on the Regency Airport Hotel in north Dublin – narrowly missing him but killing key ally David Byrne.
The Regency Airport Hotel attack remains one of the most chilling shootings in Ireland’s history and kick started the bloody feud.
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