← The Underworld Podcast
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- [00:01]
Carvana Customer
Oh, the car from Carvana's here. Well, will you look at that. It's exactly what I ordered. Like precisely. It would be crazy if there were any catches.
- [00:12]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
But there aren't, right?
- [00:14]
Carvana Narrator / Sarah (AMPM Ad)
Right. Because that's how car buying should be with Carvana. You get the car you want, choose delivery or pickup and a week to love it or return it.
- [00:22]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
Buy your car today with Carvana.
- [00:25]
Carvana Narrator / Sarah (AMPM Ad)
Delivery or pickup fees may apply. Limitations and exclusions may apply. See our seven day return policy@carvana.com Running.
- [00:31]
Shopify Narrator
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- [01:00]
Podcast Narrator / Sean Williams
May 17, 2017 at Dubai's Burj 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 Burj is playing host to a very different.
- [01:21]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
Constellation of heavy hitters.
- [01:24]
Podcast Narrator / Sean Williams
In one of its glitzy, gilt lined ballrooms, the underworld wedding of the year is taking place. Walking down the aisle, Cuiva Robinson, tall and blonde from a suburb in North Dublin. Her man to be Daniel Kinahan, short and sturdy, thinny hair, just short of his 40th birthday. Robinson's ex husband, Mika 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. Kinahan 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 Kinahan 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 Kinahan organised crime group really is a global affair, and in Dubai, many of them have found a home away from cops prying eyes. Ridouan Taghi, a murderous Dutch Moroccan dealer. He's there at the Burj. So is Edin Gassanin, a Bosnian Dutch kingpin. Raffaele Imperiale, of Italy's deadly Camora. He's there too. Shortly before, Italian police had discovered two stolen Van Goghs at Imperiali's home near Naples. Kinahan 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, whom 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.
- [03:19]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
In European police history.
- [03:21]
Podcast Narrator / Sean Williams
But Kinahan, who keeps well away from such tech, will stay a free man, married and running his empire from Dubai. Some call Kinahan 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 Kinahan's seven star freedom really last forever? Is it truly possible to mastermind a cross continental multi billion dollar cartel without running into serious trouble? This is the underworld podc. Hello everyone and welcome to the weekly podcast that forages about in the global font of organized 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 aides.
- [04:37]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
Or or about $100 billion.
- [04:39]
Podcast Narrator / Sean Williams
I am Sean Williams in a bright and sunny Wellington, New Zealand. I took 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 writer to the New Yorker magazine, I last spoke to Ed about his rangy article on the Encro chat and skyec bust a couple of years back. And we're catching up today about Daniel Kinahan because Ed just published a big.
- [05:11]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
Piece at the magazine on him.
- [05:13]
Podcast Narrator / Sean Williams
Firstly, a reminder to sign up to our Patreon if you want bonus shows, interviews, reading lists, all that good stuff.
- [05:19]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
Or just to throw us a few holiday bucks.
- [05:21]
Podcast Narrator / Sean Williams
But on to the episodes which yeah, it's a really, really cool one.
- [05:26]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
So Ed, thanks for joining us today. Your story for the New Yorker, which is brings together all these kind of disparate and expansive pieces into one narrative, begins with a wedding at a place called the Burj 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. On the sea. Who's getting married and what's the significance of that moment and why did you decide to lead with that?
- [05:55]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
So Daniel Kinahan is getting married in 2017 to Keithah Robinson. And this is a fantastic melting pot wedding. There's people from all different kind of parts of Daniel Kennan'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 gonna come back to in 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 glitz, but also secrecy. You know, 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 it there.
- [06:55]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
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 Eden Kasanin, I think I'm saying his name right, Bosnian Gachenin. Sorry, apologies, I think so Balkan listeners. And then you've got Ricardo Rikel M. Vega, a Chilean drug importer. And you've got Rafael Imperiali, who's the. Yes, he's one of the leaders of the Camorra. So this is like a who's who of who in the drug trade. But it's, 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. So. But all in all, except for Daniel Kinahan, this guy who's 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, to the grips of law enforcement, where the other guy is, have been. Have been locked up.
- [07:59]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
So a few things to say about this. The first is that I don't know exactly. Right. Because if I did, yeah, I'd really know something that everyone's been trying to work out for ages. So I don't know precisely, but what. 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, etc, and Encroachat in particular, the most interesting thing that they said to me was Daniel Kinahan himself was never on these big networks. And you can see in those conversations that other people in the organization, in the Kinahan organization, are on the networks, more junior people, and that if you wanted to get a message to Kinahan, to Daniel Kinahan 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 you wanted to discuss. So that was smart, because one of the reasons why Rick, Elmo, Imperiale, Gachelin, 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, you know, it's the biggest police breakthrough in decades. And the reason why it was such a big, 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 Kinahan, it's more difficult because he is not personally on the chats. So Sean McGovern, who was the guy that one of the two people that used to go and meet him to, you know, relay messages, he is now in prison in Ireland awaiting a court date. And it's a. It's. It's just easier to build a case against someone who you. 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. 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. There was someone on the books at MTK Global, which was Kinahan's sports business, boxing business, who, you know, was 20 years in the Dubai government, you know, trained at the Dubai Police Academy. If you listen to Imperial's 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 that the Kinahans just must have played an incredibly smart game in terms of who their friends are and how they're rewarded.
- [10:43]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
You mentioned the Encro chat bust that we spoke about, I think a couple of years ago when you, when you did a story about that as well. And I think the cops were saying that it was like, I think you, you said that it was like being at the table while they were literally discussing which crimes to do.
- [10:58]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
Yeah.
- [10:58]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
And, and so there's, there's still spill out from, from that happening now in, in sort of criminal networks. Right.
- [11:07]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
There's a backlog in the, in the Crown Courts in the UK of Encro cases still. It remains it, you know, nothing will ever beat it in terms of the gathering of incriminating evidence. And if you ask now, like what criminals using to talk to each other. Yeah, there's, 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 a while, little period of time, everyone was on sky ecc. You know, people are using these much smaller networks. They use things like Signal, you know, they use off the shelf, you know, three mil, 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.
- [11:55]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
Apart from his kind of savvy in not being on Encro Chat and other, other networks like that, let's take it back to the kind of inception of the Kinahan cartel, back to his father Christie, and back to Ireland. Can you tell us a little more about how Christy comes through the underworld there and how his sons kind of build a far bigger empire?
- [12:18]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
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 rightmove and it's nearly a million euros. You know, it's like a lovely sort of terraced house in a nice bit of Dublin, you know, middle class family. He was not from the mean streets, Christy Kinahan, 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 at 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, in the mid 80s. And Christy Kinahan senior spotted an opportunity and he started importing heroin. When. When Dunn was put away, he started importing heroin and that was his start in the drugs trade. What's incredible about Christy Kinahan Senior is that he has at every turn sought to improve his skills as a criminal. So when he got sent away to Port Leash Prison, you know, he was doing Open University courses in different languages. He was, you know, apparently he's a, you know, he reads George Soros, know, business books. He is Thor. Every turn in his criminal journey, like, how can I improve as a criminal? So he, you know, he'd spend a lot of time inside. He'd moved to the Netherlands at a certain point, so 1996, after Veronica Guerin's murder.
- [14:08]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
So Veronica Garin was a. Sorry, Veronica Gari was a journalist, right? Yeah, she was. She was gunned down in. In Dublin, right on the outskirts of Dublin. And that kind of caused a lot of. Of. Of controversy. Well, obviously it was a huge scandal in Ireland at the time, Right?
- [14:24]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
Yes. But it, it led to this huge public outcry, naturally, because this, you know, 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 was the. 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 to move to the continent, and a lot of them ended up in Amsterdam or the Netherlands more generally. And Christy Kenan made a lot of great contacts out in Amsterdam. And that's really, that, that's the. That's the beginnings of what we come to know as the super cartels that. That period in the 90s. He's working with John Cunningham, who. 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. That's really the start of Cartel. But also, Daniel Kenhan, born in 1977, is. His younger brother's, a couple years younger than him, Christy Junior. 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. And when she eventually died, you know, they were genuinely Sad about it. Everyone knew who her connections were, but, you know, she was loved all the same. Struck me as a really Irish story there. So she split up with Christy Senior and the 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, by his late teens, Daniel's running drugs for his dad in Dublin. And that's really strange.
- [16:30]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
They're very different thing guys, right? They. They have completely separate characters.
- [16:34]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
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. His reputation is standing in the community. One of the detectives, retired detectives, who I spoke to for the 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.
- [17:48]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
And so how does this thing grow? I mean, where did they make their first moves then? Or how did they first kind of establish themselves there? It's. It's collaboration. Right. Chiefly that they, they're really good at working with other groups. Right?
- [18:03]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
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. It's. By 2009, you know, Daniel's role in the drug trafficking business is large enough that it's noticed by governments. So the, 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 Kinahan, 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. Does it. You know, the Spanish police start getting very interested in these guys after there's a murder in 2008, and that leads to Operation Shovel, in which they. You know, which they were all arrested.
- [19:28]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
And that uncovers something that I think is quite emblematic of the group. Right. Operation Shovel is where the police figure out that the Kinahans have gotten so big because they're fantastic money launderers. They're great at hiding the cash and squirreling it away where other groups are quite. Well, they're not. 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, and. But also they're getting more violent. Right. I mean, you mentioned this 2008 killing of Paddy Doyle is an associate of the Hutches. Could you just tell us a bit more about that feud that's quite.
- [20:05]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
Yeah.
- [20:05]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
Well known in Ireland, but maybe not outside. Yeah.
- [20:08]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
Yeah. Okay. So to cut an extremely long, bloody complicated story as know. To tell it as succinctly as I can, the Hutches began working with the Kinahans. And that was it. That was a link that Daniel kind of brokered, you know, and they. They essentially became one gang for a while. And for reasons that, 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. Of the kind of family organization, Jerry Hutch, the nephew, sorry, graffiti started appearing around Dublin. Gary Hutch, he rats. They thought he was giving evidence to the police. And there's this big attempt to try and squash this, you know, emerging disagreement 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 is. You know, 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 a boxing weigh in at the Regency Hotel. In 2016, there's this incredible attempt on Daniel Kanan's life, which ends up not killing Daniel Kinahan. But killing other people instead and causing widespread panic. So. But the details of this attack are just astonishing. You know, there was a. 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 discovered later. So they start shooting a group of armed swats. 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 Kinahans. 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 when he, 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 AK47s 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 can do anything. A number of things happened after that. Daniel Kinahan 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 and 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, you know, poor man who worked for Dublin City Council, who happened to look like one of the Hutches, who was on holiday in Majorca with his family and he was shot dead. So there's this feud spills onto the Dublin streets, and during all of this, the actual senior leadership of the Kinahans, like the, you know, the Kinahans themselves have moved to Dubai. They've gone. So all of this stuff is being carried out by underlings, right? So it's. It's really, really like a fascinating period. And I think at that point, Daniels understood something quite important, which was that, look, 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 name and try and create a different Persona for himself really ramps up at that point.
- [24:16]
Podcast Narrator / Sean Williams
But he'd already start.
- [24:17]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
He'd opened a boxing gym with. With Matthew Macklin, pretty. 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 hidden away figure. Right. He was quite public within the sport.
- [24:32]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
Yeah. Really public.
- [24:33]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
Yeah.
- [24:34]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
I. To my lasting regrets that, 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 Macklin over a period of weeks in 2007 when I was doing a profile of Ricky Hatton. So Macklin was one of two. One of two boxers 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 in a cage on the premises, was trading 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. Like, he was lovely, chatty. He just lost this epic fight to Jamie Moore and had met Kinahan already. I didn't know about the Kinahan connection, but, you know, he would sort of teach me about boxing. And there were some times 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, you know, splash of water or whatever. And when. And when I was finished for the day, he'd drive me back to the station and we sort of have a chat in the car and he'd play Irish folk music and what have you. How good I'm like, you know. A couple years later, he set up a gym with Daniel Kinahan in the. In the south of Spain. And he becomes essentially, you know, his. His business partner. And Kinahan says, you know, Matt Clint's my best friend in an interview with some boxing magazine, so the links go pretty deep. I think that story 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. Doesn't seem to have any links to crime or anything, but the facts are the facts. Like, he is. He is in bed with, you know, one of the world's biggest cocaine traffickers.
- [26:48]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
Yeah, yeah.
- [26:50]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
So the boxing, you know, Kinahan 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 mtk, which was his company, set up In Dubai. They set up a gym in Dubai. One of the fascinating bits of reporting was like, the, you know, I was told by people who would know that Rafaele Imperiale and Ridouan Tagi, 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? You know, I'd be like, oh, you know, those just, you know, the lads and whatever. And they were just kind of accepted as kind of part of the furniture. So the two, the two worlds did cross over. They, like, he wanted to separate them, but they were, they did kind of smush into one another.
- [27:43]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
And you mentioned. So, so the, the big cash cow for Kinahan at this point is cocaine. Like, when does a family get into cocaine? How does that become their, 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?
- [28:02]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
I think a lot of people realized in the 2000s that that was, that was where the money was. I always go back to this. There was a brilliant, there's a brilliant bit of academic work done. I'm going to forget the name of the group that did it. Maybe Inside Crime or. Anyway, I'll think about. I'll. I'll remember.
- [28:20]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
I think it's Inside Crime. Yeah, yeah, I think there's a brilliant bit of piece as well.
- [28:24]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
Exactly. There was a brilliant bit of academic work done, 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, and if you control transport, you basically control the trade. You know, it's a logistics business and you can, 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 turning 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.
- [29:40]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
And this is, this is your kind of rip on ripoff operations in Rotterdam.
- [29:47]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
Yeah. But also I think the Canadian had a great thing going in Valencia.
- [29:53]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
Okay.
- [29:54]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
So they, in the port of Valencia they had a number of contacts who they could, they could rely on. But yeah, I think it's wherever you can get it in, you know, Imperiale 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 a, 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 Kinahan's great skill, if you ask 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, they were able to collaborate.
- [30:38]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
You, you, you mentioned in the piece, and I'm going to quote you here about Rafaeli Empire in Imperiale. Sorry. And he, you say, he explains that the so called super cartel, so there's this kind of like huge so called accloration of different crims around the world. He says 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 we're business partners and then our past separate again. So it's almost like, 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?
- [31:18]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
I think he was one of a number of, one of a few, but one of a few really big players with who, 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 to ship out of Brazil or Venezuela, whatever, you're going to need a different group to help you with that. So it, it's fluid because the conditions are fluid.
- [32:10]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
It does sound like an exhausting job.
- [32:12]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
Exhausting. And in fact, here's another thing that didn't make into the piece. So the guy, the prosecutor that was kind of on Imperiale's Tail 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.
- [32:59]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
Yeah, that sounds awful. Should we have sympathy for him? I don't, I don't know, but I don't.
- [33:05]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
I'm not, I'm not. I, 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.
- [33:23]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
Yeah, yeah.
- [33:24]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
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 like it's going to ravage your sense of security and well being, isn't it? If you.
- [33:36]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
Yeah, sounds like journalism a little bit. So, so in, in 20, I guess, like, I guess to take it back to the boxing briefly, I mean, Kinahan's association with Tyson Fury is probably what a lot of 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 ranks. So how does that all go down and how does. It kind of spells disaster in many ways, right?
- [34:15]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
Yes. So the, the long story, the slightly longer story about Fury and Kinahan is that Kinahan kind of saved Tyson Fury when he was. So after he beat Klitschko, he went on a massive tear for many months and, you know, years and put on lots of weight and did lots of coke and was basically finished as a, as an athlete. You know, the Kinahan 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 like this, that genuine feeling of, you know, really owing someone something, but also of this guy who I think in that case did do a solid, you know, for this fighter that had, 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, you know, fought a couple of really astonishing fights, you know, after his comeback in the first Deontay Wilder fight, which was a draw in the end on the cards, when he. Fantastic fight, unbelievable fights. 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 Arum's firm, and Fury through Daniel Kinahan, about Fury joining Top Rank. And we know about a lot of this because there was this. There's been 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 Keane has basically gone public with what happened. And the details are just astonishing. Like, you know, Kinahan being promised sort of 10% of Fury's fight purse, you know, for every time he fights and deals with, you know, Kinahan being kind of a consultant for Top Rank. And, yeah, like millions and millions and millions of top ranks money flowing in Kinahan's direction for, for so, so, so that Fury will do this thing, and that's amazing. And, and then, I guess, you know, the other really interesting thing that's happening at the same time is that Daniel Kinnan 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. And they, you know, they commission a film, this like, mad film about the Regency attacks, which appears on YouTube briefly and then is taken down because of a licensing complaint, but it cost them, you know, hundreds of thousands to do.
- [37:19]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
The director is pretty reputable as well, right? I looked him up, yeah.
- [37:23]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
Yeah, like a lot of. Yeah, reputable director, you know, like, 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 gonna help. And so there's this moment in 2020 when Tyson Fury says, you know, just this video, which is now infamous, saying, you know, I'm just after getting off the phone with Daniel Kinahan. Big up to, you know, Daniel Kinahan for getting this two fight deal with Anthony Joshua over the line. And this far from being the PR masterstroke that Kinahan'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 is saying, I work for a gangster. And every, like everyone suddenly realizes, okay, this has kind of gone too far. Now we know who Daniel Kinnan 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 at which everything starts to kind of detonate around Kinahan.
- [38:36]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
And it kind of comes in concert somewhat with the Encrochat bust as well. Right. So everything is sort of exploding and imploding at the same time.
- [38:45]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
Yeah, there's a, there's a lot of, there's a lot of ructions in the, in the criminal world at that point in time, because you've got the sky, etc, you've got the Encro bus, You have like the DEA suddenly like fascinated in this person, Daniel Kinahan. 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 a reward for the capture of the Kinahan? 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 American State Department and dea, they were all gathered together in Dublin City hall and they announced sanctions against several members of the Kinahan cartel, including Daniel Kinahan. And then they announced a $5 million reward for information leading to the capture of Dan O', Kinahan, Christy Kinahan and Christy Kinahan Jr. And I think probably I thought from that moment on, I'd like to eventually write a piece about Daniel Kinahan because I thought either he'll. Either he is going to get arrested or he won't. And either way is really interesting. Yeah, yeah, like he's, you know, his younger kids go to a private school in Dubai and like, you know, what's the school gates chat like? Or like, is he a member of a golf club? I don't know. You know, it's the way that he has a kind of legitimate seeming life In Dubai still. And yet there's a wanted poster up for him. I've never quite been able to tally those two things.
- [40:23]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
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, this cocaine trade is now. And, and you mentioned a bust in on September 26, 2023, which is the MV Matthew. So this is a freighter flying the Panamanian flag, I'm quoting you now, which was intercepted south of court by Irish army who fast rope 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 Gardai. That's the, that's. The Irish police believe that the smuggling attempt was arranged and co financed by the Kinahans, Colombia's Clando Golfo 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 Dubai. This criminal collective, one detective said, had immense capabilities and unlimited resources. And that's, that's kind of the essence of it really, isn't it? It's just unbelievably international. It's, it's, it's almost literally everywhere on earth.
- [41:45]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
Just listening to you read that back, it's like it's almost psychedelic. The, I often think this about, if you dig, you know, deep, deep enough in, in, in almost, you know, any of these like big crime 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, 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, the 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 and, but you can't beat that kind of network like the one you just described. The Hezbollah guys in Venezuela are always going to find, they'll find a way.
- [42:49]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
Yeah, they're quite industrious There was a. I think there was a clause in your piece on the Encro chat and Sky CC 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 their Balkan languages and just like, crazy level of connection across the world and something that law enforcement is always going to be sort of dragging its heels to try and follow. Right?
- [43:16]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
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. We sort of touched base, but I guess I've been doing organized crime stories on and off for, you know, a few years now, and I've. I've noticed the levels of international cooperation have really gone up. I think Encrochat 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 gathered. And Europol was that. Europol really came into its own during that period because they were a. 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. That's. That's how it works. Yeah.
- [44:26]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
And so where are we with Daniel Kinahan? What's his status now? Have members of his team been getting picked off by law enforcement, or is he still pretty. Pretty strong?
- [44:36]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
Yeah, there's the. I mean, there's There have been a hell of a lot of arrests of people involved in the feud. There'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. Takes quite a lot for them to do that, but they did it. Yeah, he was extradited. His trial will be next year, probably, but that was a massive moment.
- [45:13]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
Yeah.
- [45:14]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
Because he was. He was the eyes and ears of the. 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 Kinahan in Ireland at which point arrest warrants could be issued, and then we'll see when the rubber hits the road whether the Emirates want to. Want to arrest you or not.
- [45:37]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
What about you, Ed? I mean, are you staying on the organized crime beat? It's pretty. It's a pretty rich vein.
- [45:41]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
It's a rich vein. I kind of. I dot around as. You know, like, I have some. And I 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. Which I'm really enjoying and I'm, you know, also doing, you know, a couple of the little other little smaller bits. But, yeah, I. 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. 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 whacked 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 like, how does this stuff actually work?
- [46:52]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
Yeah.
- [46:52]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
And the ways in which the illicit world rubs up against the licit world. That is, like, endlessly fascinating to me. Like, so the. So the box. The boxing aspect of this story is interesting for me, not just because it's boxing, but because it offered a kind of legitimate way for Daniel Kinahan to be in the world, which cocaine trafficking did not. And it's. And it speaks to kind of quite evergreen human urges for legitimacy and to feel like you are standing in a. In a. 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 Kinahan piece, the Neapolitan prosecutor who's been up and down to the prison where Imperiale 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 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 reporting 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, in three years time. It's just a question of like what the story is that brings you back there.
- [48:34]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean I'm personally fascinated by that as well and 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 never quite know when it's going to spurt out.
- [49:04]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
Totally agree. And thermal vents I'm going to steal.
- [49:09]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
You're welcome. Well Ed, thanks ever so much for joining me. It's, I guess it's what the evening there. It's morning here. Usual New Zealand time zone nightmare. But yeah, I guess we'll, 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.
- [49:28]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
Criminals then that'd be a great pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.
- [49:30]
Podcast Host (Sean Williams)
Thanks so much. Cheers.
- [49:32]
Ed Caesar (UK Reporter and Author)
Cheers.
- [50:47]
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