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