How Daniel Kinahan’s Cocaine Empire Began to Crumble
.jpg)
Almost exactly twenty years ago, an Italian police squad burst through the door of a dilapidated farmhouse near the town of Corleone, in Sicily, and arrested Bernardo Provenzano, the capo dei capi of the Sicilian Mafia. Provenzano was seventy-three years old. He had been on the run since the nineteen-sixties. The last known photograph of him was taken in 1959. So elusive had he proved over the preceding decades that some people thought he was already dead. In fact, Provenzano had been living a peasant’s life for many years, subsisting on cheese and chicory, while directing the operations of the Mafia using encrypted notes on pizzini, or tiny scraps of paper. Detectives located him by following the meandering path of laundry, sent to him by his wife, via multiple messengers. When he was arrested, Provenzano told the officers, “You have no idea what you’ve done.” He died in custody ten years later.
The Irishman
Ed Caesar reports on Daniel Kinahan, the cocaine kingpin living large in Dubai.
No such mystery surrounded the whereabouts of Daniel Kinahan, the forty-eight-year-old Irishman who was arrested in Dubai on April 17th. He was reportedly apprehended at one of his family’s many properties in the city, no manhunt necessary. Despite being sanctioned in 2022 by the U.S. Treasury for running “the day-to-day operations” of a vast drug empire believed by Irish investigators to be worth a billion and a half dollars, and despite a five-million-dollar reward for information leading to his arrest, Kinahan has lived openly in the United Arab Emirates for a decade. He shops at the mall. His children attend private schools. Recently, the Sunday Times of London and Bellingcat, the open-source-intelligence group, published photographs showing Kinahan attending an M.M.A. fight at the Coca-Cola Arena, in Dubai, last summer. He looked as if he was having the time of his life.
If one disregards the occasional reclusive Mafia don, serious organized crime is a social pursuit. Over the years, many of Europe’s most important operators have gathered in the same locale. For a time in the nineties, Amsterdam was an attractive base; in the two-thousands, it was superseded by the Costa del Sol, in Spain; in the twenty-tens, Dubai became the honeypot. For major criminals, the city seemed to offer not only impunity but also sunshine, an easy life style, and safety.
When Kinahan married Caoimhe Robinson at the Burj Al Arab, a luxury hotel on Dubai’s waterfront, in 2017, the wedding was attended by almost every member of a group that has become known as the Super Cartel—a collection of drug importers who, at one point, controlled around a third of Europe’s twenty-billion-dollar-a-year cocaine industry. (The wedding was also attended by Tyson Fury, the former heavyweight champion of the world, and by at least one guest who was passing information to the Drug Enforcement Agency.)
Major crooks found that as long as they behaved like regular businessmen in Dubai, they were unlikely to be harassed by law enforcement. Last year, Karen Greenaway, a former F.B.I. agent who has studied the city’s role in facilitating corruption and crime, told me that “Dubai has never cared too much about people’s reputation, as long as you’re not committing crimes in their country.”
According to the testimony of Raffaele Imperiale, an Italian cocaine trafficker and fellow Super Cartel member, Kinahan understood the unspoken rules of the city. When Ricardo (El Rico) Riquelme Vega, a Chilean Dutch cocaine importer also in the Super Cartel, wanted to murder a rival in Dubai by sending a team of Colombian assassins to the Emirates, Kinahan voiced his disapproval. As Imperiale recalled, “The Irish said, ‘You shouldn’t commit murders in Dubai. We live here, our children are here. This is a neutral country.’ ” He added that “Daniel didn’t want it, and he has an important voice.”
As I reported last October in my investigation of the Kinahan cartel’s sprawling cocaine operation, there have also been suggestions that the Emirati government’s relationship with Kinahan was about more than just apathy. While living in Dubai, Kinahan presented himself as a legitimate boxing promoter. His Dubai-based boxing stable, M.T.K. Global, employed a “brand ambassador” named Khalid al Jassmi, who had worked for the Emirati government for more than two decades, and who was—in the words of one former Kinahan employee—“integral to all the business licensing for Kinahan in Dubai . . . and all the political engagement.”
Whatever arrangements Kinahan had made, they have not proved watertight. Even before his arrest, there were signs that the Emirates was becoming less tolerant toward major criminals. Over the past few years, several members of the Super Cartel that were living in Dubai, including Imperiale, have been deported or extradited to their home countries. Then, in 2024, Sean McGovern, Kinahan’s most trusted lieutenant, was arrested in Dubai. In May, 2025, he was extradited from the U.A.E. to Ireland under the terms of a new bilateral agreement between the countries. When the Emirati police transported McGovern from prison to a private airport where he boarded a military plane, he was blindfolded.
What changed? In general, it seems that Dubai had grown concerned about its reputation. In 2022, the U.A.E. was placed on the Financial Action Task Force’s global “grey list,” a group of countries that it has deemed deficient in anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorism procedures. By 2024, the U.A.E. had done enough to be removed from the register, but the F.A.T.F. is currently in the process of assessing countries for its next “grey list,” and one investigator who has worked in Dubai suggested that scrutiny may have motivated the country to work more closely with international police forces. Other reports propose that the current conflict in the region has sharpened the U.A.E.’s desire to impede Iran and its proxies; in recent years, the Kinahans have co-financed cocaine and shipping deals with Hezbollah.
But Kinahan’s capture may have a more straightforward explanation. The High Court in Ireland issued its warrant for Kinahan only forty-eight hours before he was arrested. It was the latest development in a long diplomatic campaign by Irish police and politicians to bring members of the Kinahan gang home. Since 2022, the Irish have stationed a permanent police liaison officer in the Emirates, and have regularly flown senior police officers and political figures to the Emirates for meetings. Noel Browne, a former detective inspector for the Irish police who had investigated Kinahan, told me that the arrest was “the culmination of an awful lot of work” and that there had been “lots of to-ing and fro-ing” between Dublin and Dubai to make it happen. Browne also said, “People could read too much into the geopolitical situation.”
Irish prosecutors are seeking a single charge against Kinahan: directing the activities of a criminal organization. But the charge is wide-ranging. Prosecutors will argue that, between 2015 and 2017, Kinahan was involved in at least two murders and two attempted murders that took place during a bloody feud between his group and another Dublin-based organization, the Hutch clan. In the course of that dispute, at least eighteen people were murdered in Ireland and Spain, and both Kinahan and Gerry Hutch, the leader of the Hutch gang, survived assassination attempts.
On Monday, McGovern, Kinahan’s former top lieutenant, appeared at Dublin’s Special Criminal Court for a sentencing hearing relating to the same period. The court was first established to try terrorism cases and has a unique structure: there is no jury, just a panel of three judges who determine the verdict and the sentence. This was the first time since the nineteen-nineties that a senior figure in the Kinahan Organized Crime Group had appeared in person before an Irish court—at least on charges relating to the cartel’s crimes. Naturally, the room was packed. McGovern, who was also sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury, in 2022, had pleaded guilty in March to directing the activities of a criminal organization in relation to two crimes from the period of the Hutch-Kinahan feud. The first is the murder, in 2016, of Noel (Duck Egg) Kirwan, a friend of the Hutch family. The second is the surveillance of James (Mago) Gately, a Hutch gang member whom the Kinahans planned to murder in 2017. The evidence relating to these crimes was of special interest, given that Kirwan’s murder and Gately’s surveillance are also part of the charge against Kinahan.
McGovern, who is thirty-nine, appeared in the courtroom looking trim, with a neat beard and the hint of a residual Emirati tan. He was wearing a smart, long-sleeved black polo shirt, and carrying a sudoku book and a copy of “A Gentleman in Moscow,” the novel by Amor Towles. He sat five yards away from me, on the defendants’ bench, impassive and composed. I thought that he looked like a recently retired tennis pro, or perhaps a tech investor with a Peloton subscription.
Two detectives from An Garda Síochána, Ireland’s national police force, spent much of the proceedings reading out a précis of the evidence against McGovern, in relation to both the murder and the failed assassination attempt on James Gately. Some of the most interesting evidence was gleaned from e-mail communications between McGovern and other members of the Kinahan cartel. On BlackBerry phones, they had used Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption and a private e-mail server called “secretblackmars,” but the police have been able to decrypt the messages. One of McGovern’s frequent interlocutors went by several handles that were variations on “Bon” or “Cap.” And, although the person behind these handles wasn’t named in court, except to say that he was a “senior” leader in the Kinahan group, several sources confirmed that those handles were used by Daniel Kinahan himself.
In the e-mails between McGovern and his boss, you can see the rage that they felt for the Hutch gang. One central piece of evidence related to a flash point, in February, 2016, when the Hutches tried to murder Kinahan as he attended a boxing weigh-in at the Regency Hotel in Dublin. Kinahan escaped unscathed, but his friend David Byrne was killed in the attack, and McGovern was injured by gunfire.
“They could have wiped [us] out,” Cap wrote.
“They wanted YOU . . . THIS was PERSONAL,” McGovern replied.
Later, Cap New 1 wrote, using a euphemism for murder, “We need to drop someone asap.” Gately, the target named in both McGovern’s and Kinahan’s charges, was surveilled for weeks. McGovern’s team placed G.P.S. trackers on his and his family’s cars, which McGovern monitored from a laptop. (The gang had bought the devices from a store in Leeds, England, called the Spy Shop.) Sometimes the batteries on the trackers would run low, and McGovern’s team would need to remove and recharge the devices, before surreptitiously replacing them. Bon neww grew impatient. “I hate the cunt I swear can’t wait to do him,” he wrote.
At the time, Kinahan was in Dubai, weeks away from his lavish wedding at the Burj Al Arab. He was not going to “do” Gately himself. Nor was McGovern, who was too far up the criminal chain of command to perform such dirty work. The hit was outsourced to a hulking Estonian assassin, Imre (the Butcher) Arakas, who arrived at Dublin Airport on April 3, 2017, and was immediately tailed by officers from the An Garda Síochána’s Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau, who arrested him the next day.
The arrest caused the Kinahan gang to spiral. They suspected an informant. Bon neww wrote to McGovern, saying, “we have to change tactics mate.” McGovern replied, “100% or all going to go to jail.”
If Daniel Kinahan is eventually extradited to Ireland and tried on this BlackBerry evidence—as seems likely—it will be galling for him. He understood the danger of communicating on encrypted devices long before other major criminals. For several years, the most popular private encrypted networks for international criminals were EncroChat and Sky E.C.C., messaging services that were infiltrated by police in 2020 and 2021, respectively, culminating in the biggest European-law-enforcement breakthrough in decades. The police were patient, monitoring major criminals planning huge drug shipments and murders in real time. Evidence gathered in the EncroChat and Sky E.C.C. stings led to thousands of arrests, including those of several Super Cartel members.
Much of the analysis of the infiltrated servers was done at the Europol headquarters in The Hague, which I visited last year. The analysts who had worked on the encrypted messages told me that many senior members of the Kinahan group were on the networks, but not Kinahan himself. If you wanted to speak to Kinahan, you had to go through one of his lieutenants who lived in Dubai, normally McGovern, who took twice-weekly walks with the boss to receive his instructions. One of the Europol officers told me that Kinahan was “the only one who was smart enough” to stay off the devices.
Kinahan’s caution came too late. Between 2015 and 2017, the period of time during which he’s named in the criminal charge, he was communicating freely on what he thought was a private and secure e-mail server. (Unbeknownst to him, the Dutch police had already cracked some PGP-encrypted phones in 2016.) In the messages read out in court, the gang leader’s growing unease with the technology is apparent. When Arakas was arrested, Bon neww worried that the police might have accessed the Estonian’s BlackBerry. McGovern assured him that it had been remotely wiped, but, in fact, a quick-thinking officer had seen Arakas’s device open on a messaging page and had taken some photographs of communications between the “Bon” handles, Arakas, and McGovern. When Bon neww asked McGovern for reassurance that the police couldn’t read Arakas’s device, he added, “hope not cos I sent him mails.”
In the past decade, the leadership of the Kinahan organization has become rich and cosmopolitan, and their life styles have started to resemble those of international businessmen more than of street hoodlums. According to one former Kinahan employee, McGovern was a generous and well-liked person during his stint in Dubai, and was known as a heavy tipper. (His favorite quote was said to be from George Herbert, the seventeenth-century English poet: “Never was a miser a brave soul.”) Meanwhile, Kinahan was, in the words of a fellow boxing manager, a “perfect gentleman,” and—until he was sanctioned in 2022—was quite successful at his side gig, being paid millions by legitimate boxing-promotion companies to arrange world-title fights.
But Kinahan and McGovern are from rough areas of Dublin, and they have proved unable to outrun their roots. The criminal accusations that have brought McGovern down, and now threaten Kinahan, do not relate to the “day-to-day operations” of a drug empire that brought shiploads of cocaine from South America to Europe but to a petty and bloody feud fought on the streets of their home city.
During a sentencing hearing in Ireland, a victim-impact statement is sometimes delivered in court. On Monday, Donna Kirwan, the daughter of Noel (Duck Egg) Kirwan, asked for her statement to be read out by a lawyer. Her father was murdered outside his house, three days before Christmas. As the court heard, the gunmen were given instructions by McGovern, who was tracking the victim’s car from his laptop. By any measure, Kirwan was a soft target. He was sixty-two years old when he was shot, and was apparently not involved in crime. He had become a target of the Kinahans only after being photographed at the funeral of his childhood friend Eddie Hutch, who belonged to the rival Hutch clan.
The statement was emotive and scathing. Donna described the “nightmare” of coming to her father’s house after he had been shot, and being told not to look at the body. She detailed the lingering trauma of her father’s murder, and how she thought about it every day. And then her statement rounded on McGovern, and how he had left a trail of clues for detectives investigating the murder. Her father, she noted, “would actually be offended that someone as stupid as you had him killed.” Her statement continued, “Why would you choose to inflict that pain on us? It was Christmas.”
McGovern kept his eyes down while the statement was read to the court. He had not evinced any emotion during the hearings. I wondered if now, perhaps, his conscience might be troubled. Donna was sitting in the court, in the second row, only twenty feet away from McGovern. But, as her words were read out, McGovern sat calmly, with a pencil in his hand, completing a sudoku. ♦