Episode 8 - The Red Notebook

Summary

Hot Money: Agent of Chaos - Episode 8: "The Red Notebook"

Released on December 26, 2023 by Pushkin Industries & Financial Times

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Introduction

In Episode 8 of Hot Money: Agent of Chaos, titled "The Red Notebook," reporter Miles Johnson delves deep into the intricate web of organized crime, espionage, and international conspiracy surrounding the downfall of the German fintech giant, Wirecard. Following the €2 billion fraud exposed by the Financial Times in 2020, this episode unveils the complex layers involving Wirecard’s Chief Operating Officer, Jan Marsalek, who mysteriously vanished amidst the company's collapse and was later revealed to be a Russian spy.

Setting the Stage: The Kinahan Cartel Sanctions

The episode opens with the high-stakes sanctioning of the Kinahan criminal organization, a transnational crime cartel that originated in Dublin and expanded globally. John O'Driscoll, the Assistant Commissioner in charge of serious organized crime in Ireland, orchestrates a monumental press conference in Dublin City Hall aimed at sanctioning the Kinahans. This move is a coordinated effort involving international law enforcement agencies, including representatives from the US Treasury, DEA, Customs and Border Protection, Europol, and the UK's National Crime Agency.

Notable Quote:

"The holding of the event in City Hall was important, first of all, because it is that wonderful building that it is, but also it is situated in South Inner City Dublin, which is where the Kinahan organization emerged from."
(04:23 Miles Johnson)

The Evolution of Organized Crime

Miles Johnson provides a comprehensive overview of the changing landscape of organized crime. He highlights the blurred lines between traditional criminal enterprises and legitimate business operations, emphasizing the rise of "state-backed gangsters." These are individuals who merge the ruthlessness of crime bosses with the strategic acumen of multinational business leaders, often backed by authoritarian governments.

Notable Quote:

"We live in a time where some heads of state increasingly act like crime bosses and the crime bosses, they act like the heads of multinational companies."
(07:10 Miles Johnson)

Investigating Jan Marsalek and Iranian Espionage

A significant portion of the episode focuses on the mysterious figure of Jan Marsalek and his connections to Iranian intelligence. Through extensive reporting and interviews, Johnson uncovers the involvement of Asadollah Asadi, an Iranian diplomat and covert intelligence operative, in orchestrating assassination plots against Iranian dissidents in Europe. The discovery of a battered red notebook during Asadi’s arrest serves as a pivotal piece of evidence, linking him to multiple assassination attempts, including that of Ali Muhammad, an electrician in the Netherlands.

Notable Quote:

"But no one has ever been able to find out who in Iran gave the murder broker his orders."
(08:45 Miles Johnson)

Notable Quote:

"A man jumps out of the vehicle in front, the one that's just plowed into their car. He's holding a revolver."
(10:12 Miles Johnson)

The Red Notebook: A Key to Unraveling the Conspiracy

The "Red Notebook" becomes a central element in unraveling the conspiracy. Found in the possession of Asadi, the notebook contains handwritten notes detailing numerous clandestine meetings, cash transactions, and operational plans across Europe. This evidence suggests a systematic approach to eliminating Iranian dissidents, raising suspicions about the Iranian regime’s direct involvement in orchestrating these assassinations.

Notable Quote:

"Assadi is part of a secret unit of Iranian foreign intelligence, a sort of murder squad in Europe. It's called Department 312, and its role is to kill opponents of the regime abroad."
(19:30 Miles Johnson)

Sanctions and Their Impact on the Kinahan Cartel

The sanctions imposed on the Kinahan organization marked a significant crackdown on their operations. By severing their access to the US financial system and freezing their assets in the United Arab Emirates, authorities aimed to dismantle the cartel’s global network. However, despite these measures, the Kinahans remain elusive, leading to speculation about their current whereabouts and future operations.

Notable Quote:

"The dangers with sanctions is that if any legitimate business engages with somebody who's on a sanctions list, they're actually the people who are committing the criminal offenses, and they risk all their assets being seized and they risk being prosecuted."
(28:35 Hussein Abedini)

Unanswered Questions and Ongoing Investigations

Despite the extensive efforts by international law enforcement, several questions linger unanswered. The exact role of Asadi in the assassination of Ali Muhammad remains inconclusive, and his subsequent exchange for an Iranian aid worker adds another layer of complexity to the investigation. Additionally, the continued evasion of the Kinahan family suggests that the battle against organized crime is far from over.

Notable Quote:

"Do you think it's reasonable to assume that Assadi could have been behind something like that?"
(22:50 Miles Johnson)

Concluding Insights

Miles Johnson concludes the episode by reflecting on the broader implications of the Kinahan cartel's saga. He warns of the emergence of more sophisticated and dangerous criminal enterprises that blend legitimate business with illicit activities. The dismantling of the Kinahan organization serves as both a victory and a cautionary tale, highlighting the evolving challenges that democracies face in combating hybrid threats.

Notable Quote:

"The story of the super cartel... is an ominous sign of these new hybrid threats that democracies face and of governments weakening ability to fight them."
(34:20 Miles Johnson)

Epilogue: The Aftermath

The episode wraps up by showcasing the aftermath of the sanctions and ongoing efforts to bring key figures like Daniel Kinahan to justice. It also highlights personal stories of those affected by the cartel's activities, including reporters and politicians who have become targets or have had their lives irrevocably changed by the cartel's reach.

Notable Quote:

"With the DEA on your case, the world is a small place. And it gets smaller."
(34:50 Miles Johnson)

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Key Takeaways:

1. Interconnectedness of Crime and Politics: The episode underscores how organized crime groups like the Kinahan cartel operate on a global scale, often intertwining with political entities and leveraging international networks.

2. Role of Intelligence Agencies: The involvement of Iranian intelligence in orchestrating assassinations highlights the dangerous intersection between state actors and criminal organizations.

3. Effectiveness of Sanctions: While sanctions have significantly impacted the Kinahan cartel, their ability to remain at large raises questions about the long-term effectiveness of such measures.

4. Evolving Nature of Organized Crime: The fusion of legitimate business practices with criminal activities represents a new frontier for law enforcement, necessitating more sophisticated investigative techniques.

5. Human Cost: Beyond the geopolitical and financial implications, the episode sheds light on the personal toll exacted on individuals caught in the crossfire of these expansive criminal operations.

Hot Money: Agent of Chaos - "The Red Notebook" offers a gripping narrative that not only investigates the fall of Wirecard and the enigmatic Jan Marsalek but also provides a broader commentary on the shifting paradigms of global organized crime and state-sponsored espionage.

Transcript

[Miles Johnson]

Foreign this is an iHeart podcast.

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[Narrator]

You'Re enjoying this podcast and you want to hear more from the FT. The the FT Edit app gives you 8 of the financial Times best stories handpicked daily by our editors. You'll get the perfect daily dose of expert opinion, surprising stories and fresh perspectives from across politics, culture, business and more. Start your free one month trial today, then get your first six months for just 99p per month. Currently only available on iOS. There's a link in the show Notes previously on Hot Money. The pressure on Daniel Kinahan is rising. His partners in the Dubai super cartel are starting to fall, and police around the world are working on a secret plan to take him down for good. It's the morning of April 12, 2022, and reporters and TV crews arrive at a press conference in Dublin, that's been called by the Irish police. Officially, there'll be an update on how law enforcement agencies are working together to collaborate against international organized crime. But it's a bit vague, perhaps suspiciously vague. And journalists, they're starting to speculate about what this press conference is really about. Behind the scenes, John o' Driscoll is getting nervous. John's the Assistant Commissioner in charge of serious organized crime. Ever since his meeting with US officials three years before, he's been working on a single objective. And the press conference this morning in Dublin is going to be the moment he finally gets to announce it to the world. But John knows that if word gets out, it could all fall apart. He's chosen the venue carefully.

[Miles Johnson]

I said that beyond any doubt, it was not going to take place in those rooms, that we may have had press conferences relating to the Kinahans previously.

[Narrator]

Instead, it would take place in Dublin City Hall. It's the right sort of setting for a historic announcement. Marble floors, huge classical pillars and statues on ancient Roman style plinths.

[Miles Johnson]

The holding of the event in City hall was important, first of all, because it is that wonderful building that it is, but also it is situated in.

[Hussein Abedini]

South inner city Dublin, which is where.

[Miles Johnson]

The Kenhan organization emerged from.

[Narrator]

Quietly. Senior officials from various foreign police forces have been flying into Dublin. People from the US Treasury, DEA and Customs and Border Protection officials from Europol and the UK's National Crime Agency, including Deputy Director of Investigations Matt Horn.

[Miles Johnson]

We'd arrived the day before from the UK and had been extremely well looked after by the Garda from the airport. And, you know, they were keeping a.

[Narrator]

Very close eye on us to make sure that all of us representatives of.

[Miles Johnson]

The international law enforcement community were sort.

[Narrator]

Of well looked after and well protected. And despite all these high profile police officers arriving in Dublin at exactly the same time, John's been able to keep things under wraps. Everyone's now seated. The hall falls quiet in anticipation and John walks out onto the stage. Within minutes, the Kinahans will become some of the most wanted men on the planet. I'm Marles Johnson and from the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries, this is hot money. The New Narcos Episode 8 the Red Notebook Back when I started at the FT as a trainee reporter 15 years ago, I never expected I'd end up writing about organized crime. We covered things like the stock market and mergers and acquisitions. There was this very clear boundary back then between the world we wrote about and the world of business CEOs and politicians and the underworld. But something's changed. Since then, the line between criminal activity and state backed enterprise, between big business and gangsters has become fuzzier. We live in a time where some heads of state increasingly act like crime bosses and the crime bosses, they act like the heads of multinational companies. It could be a world leader investing billions into startups and tech companies, but at the same time ordering the murder of dissidents abroad. It could be North Korean state hackers stealing bitcoins to fund missile programs. Or Kremlin backed tycoons using mercenary armies to mine for gold in Africa. Or it could be a cocaine cartel hiding out in Dubai while carrying out contract killings in Europe for a sanctioned regime. It's all part of the rise of a new type of criminal boss, one backed by authoritarian governments. I call them state backed gangsters. And they're thriving at a time when the world is becoming more fragmented and more chaotic. Reporting on the Dubai super cartel, I've discovered that European drug traffickers have been taking advantage of the same money laundering channels that Iran uses to evade Western sanctions. That seems to be the reason why international criminals have become unlikely bedfellows with a theocratic regime. That press conference that John's arranged, he knows it could be the beginning of the end for the super cartel. But before we get to that, I want to take a little detour because there's an important question from the start of this series that we still don't have an answer to. The murder Broker was convicted for arranging the assassination of Ali Mudhamed, the electrician who was on the run from Iran. But no one has ever been able to find out who in Iran gave the murder Broker his orders. And during the reporting of this series, I came across something that might help us get one step closer. It was a case that revealed a ton of new information about the way that Iran secretly pursues its enemies in Europe. People like Ali Muhammad. And there's someone I want to talk to because he was directly involved in that case. Someone who has firsthand experience of the long history of violence against enemies of the Iranian regime wherever they are in the world. Hossein Abedini was born in Iran, but he now lives in London. He's in his late 50s and he's quietly spoken, but he's been fighting for most of his life.

[Miles Johnson]

I have been with the resistance over three decades now, nearly four decades.

[Narrator]

In the spring of 1990, Hussain was a young activist and he was in Turkey. He says he traveled there to try and stop the deportation of Iranian refugees who'd crossed the border illegally. One day In Istanbul. He's in a car with two colleagues. They're on the motorway when suddenly something blocks the road ahead. The traffic slows down. Hussein's up front, sitting next to the.

[Miles Johnson]

Driver, and all of a sudden we heard, you know, the sound of bullets. They riddled our car from the back.

[Narrator]

Hussein barely has time to take in that someone is shooting at them when a car smashes into the front of their vehicle. They can't drive away.

[Miles Johnson]

Another car pinned us from behind. He was 10, which I realized, you know, this was a. This was an assassination or kidnapping.

[Narrator]

A man jumps out of the vehicle in front, the one that's just plowed into their car. He's holding a revolver.

[Miles Johnson]

It was only, I think, a couple of meters before he reached our car. I tried to do something. There was a briefcase belonging to my female colleague who was sitting the back of the car. So I just took that, opened the door and went to stop him.

[Narrator]

He's clutching the briefcase like a shield as the man starts shooting.

[Miles Johnson]

The first bullet hit my chest, and I didn't know how many bullets, you know, I received then. And I just fell down, fell down in the street.

[Narrator]

Hussein's lying on the ground bleeding, and he can see the man walk up to him. He's preparing to take a final shot, but nothing happens.

[Miles Johnson]

The bullet jammed and the muzzle of the gun.

[Narrator]

That's Hussein's first lucky break. The traffic starts to move again and the assassins take off. Hussein desperately needs to get to the hospital, but the car he was in is smashed up. And everyone else on the motorway, they seem to be trying to run away as quickly as they can.

[Miles Johnson]

I remember very vaguely that my colleague threw herself, you know, in front of one of the cars. And there was a taxi which stopped. And I was put at the back of the taxi and I just got unconscious. The hospital was only three minutes away. If it was further than that, I wouldn't make it.

[Narrator]

Hussain fell into a coma. It would be 50 days before he woke up. He was told that one bullet had passed very close to his heart and another had destroyed his liver. But even at the hospital, he's not safe. The killers, they come back, and this time they're posing as his friends.

[Miles Johnson]

But my true friends arrived and they were told, you know, there are other people who wanted to come and see me. And when those people escaped from the scene, when they realized, you know, there were people, my true friends, you know, were there.

[Narrator]

That's Hussein's second stroke of luck. And there'll be a third one as well when the killers call up, pretending to be the police. They tell the hospital staff that they know Hussein is now conscious and they want to interview him about what happened.

[Miles Johnson]

But the president of Turkey in those days was Turgo Dozal. And his mother, you know, was in the same hospital. The president wanted to come and visit his mother and they sealed off the whole area, the hospital, and they realized there was another branch of police who wanted to come and see me. And they found out that was a bogus call. It was the Iranian regime who wanted to get rid of me because they didn't want me to speak. That was very pure luck.

[Narrator]

That was more than 30 years ago. Hussein tells me he's still affected every day by the damage done to his liver in that attack. But he's one of the rare survivors of an assassination attempt by the Iranian regime. Several of his friends and colleagues have been murdered since then. Today, Hussein is a senior member of Iran's main foreign opposition group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, or the ncri.

[Miles Johnson]

So the main objective of the National Council of Resistance of Iran is to establish a democratic and a secular government in Iran. Its main principle, of course, has been against any dictatorship, whether it's the former dictatorship of the Shah or the present medieval dictatorship of the mullahs.

[Narrator]

The ncri, it's an umbrella organization and one of the largest groups within it is called the People's Mujahideen Organization of Iran, known by its Farsi initials, mek. Now, the mek, it hasn't always had the West's approval. It was implicated in several terrorist attacks against Iran, including the 1981 bombing that Tehran claimed was carried out by Ali Mutamid, the quiet electrician in the Netherlands. From 1997 to 2012, the MEK was designated as a terror organisation by the US government. But over the past decade it's refashioned itself and now it's a pretty influential opposition voice on Iran. But for all its acceptance by Western powers, the NCRI remains a top target of the Iranian regime. In June 2018, Hussain and his colleagues are in Paris. They're holding a huge meeting, a rally called the Free Iran World Summit.

[Miles Johnson]

Tens of thousands of Iranians with many non Iranian supporters of the resistance who came from 67 different countries throughout the world.

[Narrator]

Dozens of foreign politicians are invited as well, and everyone convenes in a vast conference center. It's only afterwards that Hussein finds out what very nearly happened.

[Miles Johnson]

I think it was on the 1st of July. The next day I was told by a friend that the Belgian Federal Police, you know they had arrested two Iranians who were trying, you know, to bring a bomb.

[Narrator]

Belgian police had arrested two Iranians who were on their way to the Paris Conference center with a bomb. It's another lucky escape for Hussein and hundreds of other people. And as police investigate the failed bomb plot, they're going to discover something that I believe could shed new light on the murder of Ali Muhammad. It's the most important discovery in decades about how Iran targets its enemies abroad. And this time, the clues aren't just glimpses, hints, or encrypted messages. They're in a battered red notebook filled with handwritten notes sitting in the back of a car. When you're a pro, you got to do a little bit of everything.

[Miles Johnson]

A little.

[Narrator]

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And months before the Paris rally, he traveled to Tehran, returning to Europe with a sophisticated bomb hidden in his diplomatic luggage. The bomb's made from an explosive known as tatp, or Mother of Satan. It's extremely volatile. Assadi carries it onto Luxembourg and hands it over to his agents. In this part of the story, it's a bit less like a Le Carre novel, because the venue he chooses, it's a Pizza Hut. He gives him the bomb with instructions for planting it at the Paris rally, and the code word he uses is PlayStation. But what Asadi doesn't know is that European intelligence agencies have been watching his every move and know exactly what he's been planning. They even disabled the airport security scanner so he could get through. The two agents are arrested as they travel from Brussels to Paris. Assadi is pulled over by the police on a motorway in Germany. And in the back of his car, they find a battered red notebook filled with handwritten notes. Notes that reveal that Asadi was involved in way more than one bomb plot. Assadi has listed hundreds of different meetings with agents across Europe. He's itemized cash payments he's made to spies. And he's listed more than 200 places he's visited as part of his work in 11 different countries. Because Asadi, according to the findings of a Belgian criminal court, is part of a secret unit of Iranian foreign intelligence, a sort of murder squad in Europe. It's called Department 312, and its role is to kill opponents of the regime abroad. There's not much public information about Department 312, but what we do know, it's pretty terrifying. It's thought to be a top secret unit that specializes in spying on human rights activists, journalists and others who the Iranian regime believed to be a threat. But was Ali Muhammad one of their targets? We know that Assadi arrived in his new job in June 2014, a little over a year before Ali Mutamid was killed outside his house in Almere. It was the first successful targeted assassination carried out by Iran in Western Europe in over 23 years. And then two years later, in 2017, while Assadi was still free, another Iranian opposition member was gunned down in the Netherlands. So we can say that Assadi arrives in Vienna in late 2014, and then suddenly Iran is linked to several assassinations in Europe. This isn't conclusive evidence, but according to the Belgian criminal court documents targeting dissidents, that was Assadi's job. So it makes sense that he would at least be a suspect in the Mutamid murder. And we also know that Asadi was. He was reporting into really top people in Iran, including the Deputy Minister of Intelligence. After his arrest for the bomb plot, Assadi is put on trial in Belgium and he gets prison visits from some of Iran's most senior spies and other officials from its Foreign ministry. They clearly cared a lot about this case. The criminal case against Assadi was brought by the Belgian government, but There were also 25 others who joined as private plaintiffs. They were all at the Paris rally, and Hussain was one of them. And it gave him access to all the prosecution's evidence. He sent me the files. This is hundreds of pages of documents in several European languages. And there's also extracts from Assadi's red notebook. And there's something else, something that I think could be important. Assadi's Job meant that he had to travel a lot on work trips across Europe to meet with his various agents. And it turns out that even spies use booking.com, the huge online travel agent, to book their hotels. Or at least Asadi did. And the details of all those bookings, they're in the files. So I'm sat here in the offices of the Financial Times looking at these records. Every hotel Assadi stayed in over his four years operating in Europe. For some of the bookings, he used his official Iranian Foreign Ministry email address. For others, it was burner accounts from Yahoo and Gmail. He seems to have met his agents in some pretty low key locations. And he often seemed to book two hotels in different places for the same night, maybe thinking it would throw off anyone who was following him. In the records, they do show that he traveled to The Netherlands on 6 September 2016, less than a year after Mutamid was murdered. He stayed at the Best Western in the HA for one night. The next evening, Asadi booked two hotel rooms, one in the Dutch town of Meppel and another in Svart Sluys, both really small towns. And in April 2017, Assadi booked a room at the Savoy Amsterdam for one of his agents. So we know he was working in the Netherlands at around the same time that Ali Mutamid was murdered. It's far from a smoking gun, but it's enough, enough for me to ask Hussain, does he think that Assadi could have been connected to the murder of Mohammad Reza Kalahi, also known as Ali Mutamid? I lay out what we know. So he arrives, Assadi arrives in Austria in 2014, and then in 2015, a man called Mohammad Reza Kolahi, who was living in a town in Almer, was shot and killed outside his house. The murder has never been solved. They know who shot him. They know who told those people to shoot him. The Dutch government then said, we believe the Iranian regime was behind this murder and they expelled two diplomats. But there's never been any further information about who could have coordinated a plot like that. Do you think it's reasonable to assume that Assadi could have been behind something like that?

[Miles Johnson]

Well, I don't have precise information about this case, but I think it makes sense to believe that, of course. I mean, when Assadi was the, you know, the head of this intelligence section in mainly the Western Europe, I think that is, this could very well be. I mean, Assadi could very well be behind that.

[Narrator]

So it's reasonable to assume, you know, we have a spy working under diplomatic cover, who is in charge of all of Western Europe and his focus is effectively organizing assassination attempts against opposition figures. So it's a reasonable assumption to think that of the assassinations or attempted assassinations that occurred in Western Europe after 2014, he presumably would have had to have some.

[Miles Johnson]

He's had a hand in it. Hand in it, absolutely.

[Narrator]

What Hussein says, of course, it doesn't prove anything, but at the very least, Assadi has to be considered a suspect. There's this new wave of assassinations in Europe, all connected to the Iranian state, and they begin just after Assad is posted to Vienna in 2014. And the first is the murder of an electrician in a small Dutch town. A year later, Assad is convicted for the attempted bombing in Paris and He's sentenced to 20 years for attempted murder and plotting a terrorist attack. Iran denies any involvement, but we'll never know if he was involved in Ali Mohammed's death, because after Assadi is convicted, a Belgian aid worker is arrested in Iran on these trumped up charges of espionage and sentenced to 40 years in prison and 74 lashes. Then, in May 2023, the Belgian government agrees to exchange Asadi for the aid worker to Assadi. He's now back in Iran. And his notebook aside, he's taken his secrets with. It's 12th April 2022 and we're back in Dublin City Hall. The entire time, John o' Driscoll has been working on a plan to sanction the Kinahans. He's been worried about it leaking because he knows that if the news gets out, they'll quickly be able to hide their assets before they're frozen. Today is a landmark day, but now the Kinahans have run out of time and in particular against the Kinahan organised crime gang. John's boss, Drew Harris, Commissioner of the Irish Police, steps up to the podium. This organised crime gang started life as south inner city Dublin drug dealers, but has grown over the decades to become a transnational crime cartel that is estimated to have generated over 1 billion euro for them. Then a senior official from the US treasury announces the news that will make headlines around the world. So, as of today, the Kinahan transnational criminal organization joins the ranks of Italy's Camorra, Mexico's Los Zetas, Japan's Yakuza and Russia's thieves in law. Also, as of today, the result of these sanctions, these individuals are immediately severed from the US financial system and any assets or property under US jurisdiction are immediately blocked. At this moment, we have to stop here for A minute just to take this all in. It's utterly remarkable. A criminal family that began in a Dublin flat in the 1980s is now being compared to the Yakuza and Camorra crime groups whose origins date back hundreds of years. They've been sanctioned by the US Government, one of a handful of organized crime groups to ever face that kind of penalty. And the US Also puts a five million dollar bounty on the heads of Christie Daniel and his brother Christopher Jr calling their organization a threat to the entire licid economy through its role in international money laundering. Detective Chief Superintendent Seamus Boland. He knows that the US sanctions will destroy the Kinahan's chance of continuing their life of luxury in Dubai.

[Hussein Abedini]

Because the dangers with sanctions is that if any legitimate business engages with somebody who's on a sanctions list, they're actually the people who are committing the criminal offenses, and they risk all their assets being seized and they risk being prosecuted. So, you know, avenues to live the high life that you would have had before are closed down very, very quickly. You know, people end up with so much money from cocaine trafficking behind all this. It's all about greed. You have money to try and live in your big house, drive your fancy car, fly business class all across the world, world, stay in the best hotels. What the sanctions actually does is it removes a lot of the facilitation that would be possible for people to live their lives and to benefit from the illicit wealth that they've actually achieved.

[Narrator]

Soon, the United Arab Emirates freeze Daniel's assets, too, and they impose their own sanctions on the Kinahans in Dubai, removing one of the last places on earth they can hide the Kinahans, they go on the run.

[Hussein Abedini]

Significant parties within the Kinahan organized crime group all went aground and have been attempting to evade justice and hide in the shadows since that date. But from our own information and intelligence and conversations with other criminals as well. You know, I think this took it to a different level because the criminal on the world in Europe didn't anticipate that sanctions was something that would happen on this side of the Atlantic.

[Narrator]

But the strange thing is it's been more than a year since that big announcement in Dublin. And the Kinahans, they're all still at large. It's not clear where they are. I've heard multiple rumors. Some think that they're still in the uae, living under false identities. Others think that they're somewhere else in the Middle east laying low. I've even heard speculation that they're building connections with Putin's Russia. So I asked Seamus, why haven't the police been able to bring them in yet?

[Hussein Abedini]

Well, investigations are still ongoing as well at the moment. So the sanctions was only one phase of a much wider investigation that's continuously ongoing and taking place. And as was announced in April 2022, at the design as well, you know, extradition warrants were in place for one of the principals who's sought for charges in relation to murder and directing organized crime. And that's still outstanding as well. But you can rest assured that investigations are continuing actively across many different jurisdictions.

[Narrator]

For a few years. The men who gathered at Daniel Kinahan's wedding in 2017 seemed almost invincible. They created a new model. Stateless gangsters using modern technology to run global mafias in ways that were impossible a few decades before. But eventually, their reputation caught up with them. They made the mistake of becoming too public, too brazen. I began reporting on this story because I think it tells us something important about how the world is changing and the global shifts that made the Dubai Super Cartel possible. They're only accelerating the criminals of the future. I think they're going to be more global, more sophisticated and more dangerous. And I think it's going to get harder to tell if someone's a gangster, a businessman, or both. The story of the super cartel. For me, it's an ominous sign of these new hybrid threats that democracies face and of governments weakening ability to fight them. The sanctions against the Kinahans, they've been hailed as a victory, a landmark in coordinated action by Western governments to take down a major crime group. But there's something I've kept asking myself. Were the sanctions a show of strength or really just a sign of weakness? Some of the world's most powerful governments have teamed up to go after the Kinahans. But a year later, they're still out there. So the Dubai Super Cartel may be finished, but its model will live on. And perhaps something new, and maybe worse will take its place. In fact, somewhere out there, it probably already has. Not long before the sanctions were announced, Raffaele Imperiale, the Van Gogh boss, was arrested in Dubai and sent to Italy. He's since agreed to become a state's Witness. And in November 2023, he told Italian prosecutors he would sell off his $80 million private island in Dubai in the hope of his sentence being reduced. Mtk, the boxing company that Daniel Kinahan co founded. It closes. And back in the Netherlands, where we began our story, Paul Vux, the crime reporter, has been able to come out of police protection and return to his normal life. We want our life back in full. So not riding an armored car, but riding the bike and sitting on a terrace. Ulise Elian, the local counselor in Almer who campaigned about the Ali Muhammad murder, well, he's now a national politician. In 2021, he was elected to the Dutch parliament. Look, you know, I was like this baby when I got here. My father had, like, $20 in his pocket. The honor of representing the Dutch people, it's massive for me. My goal in life is defending democracy, defending freedom. And that relates to the story of my dad and also this story. Look how dangerous the world around us can be. In the Kinahans, they have to live every day knowing they're being hunted by police. For Mike o', Sullivan, the man who first arrested Christy Kinahan in a Dublin flat back in the 1980s, it's only a matter of time. You feel like saying to them, did you not think this day had come by doing what you're doing? Better people than them have been gone and they have made themselves a global target. And with the DEA on your case, the world is a small place. And it gets smaller. Hot Money is a production of the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries. It was written and reported by me, Miles Johnson. And if you've got any leads or information about this story, you can email [e-mail] the series producer is Peggy Sutton. Edith Rousselot is the associate producer. Fact checking is by Arthur Gompertz, engineering by Sarah Bruguerre, Sound design from Jake Gorski. Jeremy Warmsley wrote the original music. Our editor is Sarah Nix and the executive producers are Jacob Goldstein and Cheryl Brumley. Special thanks to Rilla Kallaf, Laura Dubois, Peter Spiegel, Topher Forges, Manuela Saragoza, Breen Turner, John Schnarz, Jacob Weisberg, Alistair Mackey, Laura Clark, Nigel Hansen, Paulo Pasquale, Minnie Adventula, Dan Dombey, Tom Braithwaite, Rhonda Taylor, Matt Vella, Alex Barker, Producer, Patricia Nilsson, Matt Garahan, Madison Marriage Paul Murphy, Rich Ward, Arlie Adlington, Marsha Walraven, Jude Weber, Carrie Brody, Eric Sandler, Nicole Opden Bosch, Christina Sullivan, Vicki Merrick, Jake Flanagan and Greta Cohn.

[Miles Johnson]

This is an I Heart podcast.