Just over a decade after almost being murdered by the Hutch gang at the Regency Hotel in north Dublin, a different end of the road appears to have arrived for Daniel Kinahan. He is gangland’s ultimate “nepo baby”, inheriting the keys to the kingdom from his father, Christy Kinahan, the founder of the Kinahan cartel.
Kinahan jnr has enjoyed the most audacious run in the history of Irish organised crime. The once small-time thug from Oliver Bond flats in Dublin’s south inner city used his drug money to climb to the top of professional boxing.
Though the Kinahan cartel he led – a subset of the European super-cartel – was estimated by the Garda to be worth €1 billion, he has been in a prison cell in Dubai since Wednesday. All the trappings of the high life were taken from him in an instant when Dubai Police put the handcuffs on him in a secret operation, news of which did not emerge until Friday evening.
And if all goes according to plan – if he is extradited to Ireland and convicted before the Special Criminal Court – it is possible the 48-year-old will not be at liberty again until he is in his 70s.
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If convicted of directing organised crime, for example, he would face a prison term of up to life. A life tariff in the Republic generally means 20 to 25 years in prison, though in special cases it can be longer. Nobody has ever been jailed for life for directing organised crime, but Kinahan is likely to break the mould, as he has done for the past 20 years.
Not content with raking in millions while trying to keep a low profile, as his father had done, Daniel Kinahan craved the limelight. He established a boxing gym in Marbella, Spain, where the cartel started out more than 25 years ago. It morphed into a big combat sports promotion agency, mainly involved in professional boxing, based in Dubai, where he moved around 2016.
He has survived at least two attempts on his life and emerged from the Kinahan-Hutch feud, which claimed 18 lives, still the leader of the Kinahan cartel and still a big figure in boxing.
In June 2020, British champion heavyweight Tyson Fury took to social media to thank Kinahan, name-checking him, for putting in place a fight between him and Anthony Joshua – “the biggest fight in British boxing history”. It was clear Kinahan was a money man at the top of the sport.
But his efforts to come out into the open were so brazen, and the threat he posed so great, that US law enforcement decided to join the fight against him and his cartel.
[ Cartel leader Daniel Kinahan arrested in Dubai following covert police operationOpens in new window ]
In April, 2022, Kinahan and six others at the apex of the Kinahan cartel – including his father, Christy, and brother, Christopher jnr – were sanctioned by American law enforcement.
No American citizen or company could do business with them, including all American banks. They were not allowed to travel to the United States or even be carried on US airlines. The ban stopped Kinahan’s gallop in boxing – a pay-per-view, US-centric, business.
Gardaí recently told The Irish Times the sanctions had terrified the Kinahans to such an extent they had not left their base in Dubai. They had become some of the most wanted men in Europe after the Americans so publicly joined the fight against them.
All the while, the Irish Government and the Garda were working with the authorities in the UAE to foster a closer relationship that might help catch the Kinahans. When one of the sanctioned men – Dubliner Sean McGovern – in 2024 became the first Kinahan cartel member to be arrested in Dubai, for extradition to Ireland, the writing was on the wall.
McGovern has since pleaded guilty to directing organised crime in Dublin on the Kinahan side of the Kinahan-Hutch feud. He was tripped up by getting too hands-on in the day-to-day violence in his home city.
And now Kinahan is facing the same outcome. It seems he too will be charged with directing organised crime in Dublin related to the feud. His hatred for the Hutch gang, it seems, drew him too close to the flames. And though it has taken almost a decade for those mistakes to come for him, it appears that day has arrived.
Kinahan went to Dubai in 2016 to get away from his Irish rivals in Dublin and Spain, as well as the Garda and other European police forces. He believed the extradition-shy authorities in the UAE would never lift him.
For a time he continued to make his name there – in boxing and in the global illicit drugs trade. But then it became his prison. And now he has become one of its prisoners.
