4 hours ago
7
A decade after escaping assassination and fleeing into exile, Daniel Kinahan is on his way back to Ireland – but it is not the homecoming he wanted.
The alleged leader of the Kinahan organised crime group was extradited from Dubai in an Irish government jet on Sunday and headed to a huge security operation in Dublin, marking the end of a global game of cat-and-mouse with European, US and Gulf authorities.
If all goes according to plan, the 49-year-old will land at Casement aerodrome in Dublin on Sunday evening and be taken in a bomb-proof van to the criminal courts of justice in central Dublin where he will be charged with directing organised crime before being taken 50 miles outside the city to his new home in Portlaoise prison.
Tabloid headlines anticipated his return with glee. “Du-Bye!” said one. “Dan and Dusted,” said another. “Kin Air: He’s Coming Home,” said another.
It is a moment long sought by law enforcement agencies that named Kinahan as a leader of a cartel said to control about a third of Europe’s cocaine supply, along with running criminal sidelines in firearms and racketeering.
As the founder of the boxing management company MTK Global the Dubliner was also an influential figure in sports and boasted of friendships with Tyson Fury and other champions.
Kinahan has not been tried but is braced for conviction and a long sentence, according to clips of an interview that he gave by phone from Dubai to the podcaster James English. “I think I’ve already got life in prison. And we have to go through the dance now.”
The married father of five said he had “not been an angel” but that accusations against him were overblown. “I believe in a way I’m a scapegoat.” He had not laundered money through boxing promotion, he said, rebutting one of the allegations against him.
Kinahan said he looked forward to familiar Irish treats such as a crisp sandwich. “Get back home and have a little bit of batch bread and a packet of King crisps or Tayto.”
The bravado, or fatalism, could not disguise a dramatic fall. From gilded opulence in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), allegedly at the helm of a criminal empire worth hundreds of millions of euros, Kinahan will reportedly become an inmate at the maximum-security A5 unit within A block at Portlaoise.
His father, Christopher Kinahan, launched a family enterprise in the 1980s by importing heroin into Dublin. A polished figure with university degrees and a facility for languages, Kinahan senior, better known as Christy, was convicted of drug and money laundering while creating a network that spanned Latin America, north Africa, the UK and continental Europe.
In 2009, a US diplomatic cable named his son Daniel as “an Irish businessman involved in narco-trafficking throughout Europe”. Soon after, Spanish authorities arrested Christy and Daniel and seized assets, but the Kinahans emerged largely unscathed.
That changed when a murderous feud with the rival Hutch gang piled up corpses and led to an audacious but unsuccessful attempt on Daniel’s life at a boxing weigh-in at Dublin’s Regency hotel in February 2016. The death of one man, David Byrne, fuelled further killings.
Kinahan was never again seen in public in Ireland and operated from southern Spain before settling in Dubai in the UAE, which had no extradition agreement with Ireland. With his father and brother Christopher junior, Daniel remained alert to surveillance attempts but lived openly and turned MTK Global into a boxing powerhouse.
That apparent untouchability evaporated in 2022 when the US offered a reward of up to $15m for information that led to the arrest or conviction of the trio. Washington had been reluctant to get involved until lobbied by the then assistant garda commissioner, John O’Driscoll, Greg Gatjanis, who ran the US national security council’s strategy for transnational organised crime, told the MacGill summer school last month.
“To this day I hold Ireland, the gardai, as the model [for international manhunts] of how they handled the Kinahan organisation,” said Gatjanis. “Their drug empire probably did not touch the US, but then he started talking about the effects of the Kinahan organisation and the terror they were inflicting. I went from telling him I couldn’t accommodate sanctions because I could not make a case for it to agreeing to starting up an investigation, and that began the entire sanction investigation.”
In May 2025 Ireland agreed an extradition treaty with the UAE and the net began to close. Sean McGovern, a cartel lieutenant wanted for murder and directing organised crime, was extradited that month and jailed for 24 years.
Daniel Kinahan was arrested in April this year. UAE authorities rejected his appeal last month, clearing the way for extradition. Irish military personnel are expected to reinforce police during Kinahan’s transfers to court and prison. Kinahan told the podcast he would be subject to a “circus” and “character assassination”.
Gatjanis said no organised crime group lasted for ever. “It’s born, it crawls, walks, runs, starts to decline, ultimately dies.”
