Episode 8 - The Red Notebook

33m

Law enforcement cuts off the Kinahan cartel, and a little red notebook in the back of a car might finally reveal who killed the electrician in Almere.

For more from the FT, sign up for the FT Edit App. To listen to Hot Money ad free, subscribe to Pushkin+.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Listen and follow along

Transcript

Pushkin.

This is an iHeart podcast.

On Fox One, you can stream your favorite news, sports, and entertainment live, all in one app.

It's f ⁇ ing roll in unfiltered.

This is the best thing ever.

Watch breaking news as it breaks.

Breaking tonight, we're following two major stories.

Catch history in the making.

Give me me free.

Debates,

drama, touchdown.

It's all here, baby.

Fox One.

We live for live.

Streaming now.

In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal.

T-Mobile knows all about that.

They're now the best network, according to the experts at OoCla Speed Test.

And they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

That's your business, Supercharged.

Learn more at supermobile.com.

Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S.

where you can see the sky.

Best network based on analysis by OOCHLA of SpeedTest Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

There's more to San Francisco with the Chronicle.

There's more food for thought, more thought for food.

There's more data insights to help with those day-to-day choices.

There's more to the weather than whether it's going to rain.

And with our arts and entertainment coverage, you won't just get out more, you'll get more out of it.

At the Chronicle, knowing more about San Francisco is our passion.

Discover more at sfchronicle.com.

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' 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 99p per month.

Currently only available on iOS.

There's a link in the show notes.

Previously, on hot Money, the pressure on Daniel Kinahan is rising, his partners in the Dubai supercartel are starting to fall, and police around the world are working on a secret plan to take him down for good.

It's the morning of April 12th, 2022, and reporters and TV crews arrive at a press conference in Dublin that's been called by the Irish police.

Officially, there'll be an update on how law enforcement agencies are working together to collaborate against international organised crime.

But it's a bit vague, perhaps suspiciously vague.

And journalists, they're starting to speculate about what this press conference is really about.

Behind the scenes, John O'Driscoll is getting nervous.

John's the Assistant Commissioner in charge of serious organised crime.

Ever since his meeting with US officials three years before, he's been working on a single objective.

And the press conference this morning in Dublin is going to be the moment he finally gets to announce it to the world.

But John knows that if word gets out, it could all fall apart.

He's chosen the venue carefully.

I said that beyond any doubt, it was not going to take place in

those rooms that we may have had press conferences relating to the Kenahans previously.

Instead, it would take place in Dublin's City Hall.

It's the right sort of setting for a historic announcement.

Marble floors, huge classical pillars and statues on ancient Roman-style plinths.

The holding of the event in City Hall was important, first of all, because it is that wonderful building that it is, but also it is situated in south inner-city Dublin, which is where the Kenhan organisation emerged from.

Quietly, senior officials from various foreign police forces have been flying into Dublin.

People from the US Treasury, DEA and Customs and Border Protection.

Officials from Europol and the UK's National Crime Agency, including Deputy Director of Investigations, Matt Horne.

We'd arrived the day before from the UK and had been extremely well looked after by the Garda from the airport.

And, you know, they were keeping a very close eye on us to make sure that all of us representatives of the international law enforcement community were sort of well looked after and well protected.

And despite all these high-profile police officers arriving in Dublin at exactly the same time, John's been able to keep things under wraps.

Everyone's now seated.

The hall falls quiet in anticipation, and John walks out onto the stage.

Within minutes, the Kinnahans will become some of the most wanted men on the planet.

I'm Miles Johnson.

And from the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries, this is Hot Money, the New Marcos.

Episode 8, The Red Notebook.

Back when I started at the FT as a trainee reporter 15 years ago, I never expected I'd end up writing about organized crime.

We covered things like the stock market and mergers and acquisitions.

There was this very clear boundary back then between the world we wrote about, the world of business, CEOs and politicians, and the underworld.

But something's changed since then.

The line between criminal activity and state-backed enterprise, between big business and gangsters, has become fuzzier.

We live in a time where some heads of state increasingly act like crime bosses and the crime bosses they act like the heads of multinational companies.

It could be a world leader investing billions into startups and tech companies but at the same time ordering the murder of dissidents abroad.

It could be North Korean state hackers stealing bitcoins to fund missile programs or Kremlin-backed tycoons using mercenary armies to mine for gold in Africa.

Or it could be a cocaine cartel hiding out in Dubai while carrying out contract killings in Europe for a sanctioned regime.

It's all part of the rise of a new type of criminal boss, one backed by authoritarian governments.

I called them state-backed gangsters, and they're thriving at a time when the world is becoming more fragmented and more chaotic.

Reporting on the Dubai Supercartel, I've discovered that European drug traffickers have been taking advantage of the same money laundering channels that Iran uses to evade Western sanctions.

That seems to be the reason why international criminals have become unlikely bedfellows with a theocratic regime.

That press conference that John's arranged, he knows it could be the beginning of the end for the super cartel.

But before we get to that, I want to take a little detour.

Because there's an important question from the start of this series that we still don't have an answer to.

The murder broker was convicted for arranging the assassination of Ali Muthamed, the electrician who was on the run from Iran.

But no one has ever been able to find out who in Iran gave the murder broker his orders.

And during the reporting of this series, I came across something that might help us get one step closer.

It was a case that revealed a ton of new information about the way that Iran secretly pursues its enemies in Europe, people like Ali Muthamed.

And there's someone I want to talk to because he was directly involved in that case.

Someone who has first-hand experience of the long history of violence against enemies of the Iranian regime, wherever they are in the world.

Hussein Abedini was born in Iran, but he now lives in London.

He's in his late 50s and he's quietly spoken, but he's been fighting for most of his life.

I have been with the resistance over three decades now, nearly four decades.

In the spring of 1990, Hussein was a young activist, and he was in Turkey.

He says he'd traveled there to try and stop the deportation of Iranian refugees who'd crossed the border illegally.

One day in Istanbul, he's in a car with two colleagues.

They're on the motorway when suddenly something blocks the road ahead.

The traffic slows down.

Hussein's up front, sitting next to the driver.

And all of a sudden, we heard, you know, the sound of bullets.

They riddled our car from the back.

Hussein barely has time to take in that someone is shooting at them when a car smashes into the front of their vehicle.

They can't drive away.

And another car pinned us from behind.

It was then which I realized you know this was a this was an assassination or kidnapping.

A man jumps out of the vehicle in front, the one that's just plowed into their car.

He's holding a revolver.

It was only, I think, a couple of meters before he reached our car.

I tried to do something.

There was a briefcase belonging to my female colleague who was sitting at the back of the car.

So I just took dad, opened the door, and went to stop him.

He's clutching the briefcase like a shield as the man starts shooting.

First bullet hit my chest, and I didn't know how many bullets

I received then.

And I just

fell down.

Fell down in the street.

Hussein's lying on the ground, bleeding, and he he can see the man walk up to him.

He's preparing to take a final shot.

But nothing happens.

The bullet jammed and the muzzle of the gun.

That's Hussein's first lucky break.

The traffic starts to move again and the assassins take off.

Hussein desperately needs to get to the hospital.

but the car he was in is smashed up and everyone else on the motorway they seem to be trying to run away as quickly as they

I remember very vaguely that my colleague threw herself you know in front of one of the cars and there was a taxi which just stopped and I was put at the back of the taxi

and I

just got unconscious.

The hospital was only three minutes away.

If it was farther than that I wouldn't make it.

Hussein fell into a coma.

It would be 50 days before he woke up.

He was told that one bullet had passed very close close to his heart and another had destroyed his liver.

But even at the hospital, he's not safe.

The killers, they come back and this time, they're posing as his friends.

But my true friends arrived and they were told, you know, there are other people who wanted to come and see me.

And then those people escaped from the scene when they realized, you know, there were people, my true friends, you know, were there.

That's Hussein's second stroke of luck.

And there'll be a third one as well, when the killers call up, pretending to be the police.

They tell the hospital staff that they know Hussein is now conscious and they want to interview him about what happened.

But the president of Turkey in those days was Torgudozoal and his mother, you know, was in the same hospital.

The president wanted to come and visit his mother and

they sealed off the whole area, the hospital.

And they realized there was another branch of police who wanted to come and see me.

And they found out that was a bogus call.

It was the Iranian regime who wanted to get rid of me because they didn't want me to speak.

That was very pure luck.

That was more than 30 years ago.

Hussein tells me he's still affected every day by the damage done to his liver in that attack.

But he's one of the rare survivors of an assassination attempt by the Iranian regime.

Several of his friends and colleagues have been murdered since then.

Today, Hussein is a senior member of Iran's main foreign opposition group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, or the NCRI.

So the main objective of the National Council of Resistance of Iran is to establish a democratic and a secular government in Iran.

Its main principle, of course, has been against any dictatorship, whether it's the former dictatorship of the Shah

or the present medieval dictatorship of the mullahs.

The NCRI, it's an umbrella organization, and one of the largest groups within it is called the People's Mujahideen Organization of Iran, known by its Farsi initials MEK.

Now the MEK, it hasn't always had the West's approval.

It was implicated in several terrorist attacks against Iran, including the 1981 bombing that Tehran claimed was carried out by Ali Mutamid, the quiet electrician in the Netherlands.

From 1997 to 2012, the MEK MEK was designated as a terror organization by the US government.

But over the past decade, it's refashioned itself and now it's a pretty influential opposition voice on Iran.

But for all its acceptance by Western powers, the NCRI remains a top target of the Iranian regime.

In June 2018, Hussein and his colleagues are in Paris.

They're holding a huge meeting.

a rally called the Free Iran World Summit.

Tens of thousands of Iranians with many non-Iranian supporters of the resistance who came from 67 different countries throughout the world.

Dozens of foreign politicians are invited as well and everyone convenes in a vast conference center.

It's only afterwards that Hussein finds out what very nearly happened.

I think it was on the 1st of July the next day that I was told by a friend that the Belgian federal

police, you know, they had arrested two Iranians who were trying, you know, to bring a bomb.

Belgian police had arrested two Iranians who were on their way to the Paris Conference Center with a bomb.

It's another lucky escape for Hussein and hundreds of other people.

And as police investigate the failed bomb plot, they're going to discover something that I believe could shed new light on the murder of Ali Muthamid.

It's the most important discovery in decades about how Iran targets its enemies abroad.

And this time, the clues aren't just glimpses, hints, or encrypted messages.

They're in a battered red notebook filled with handwritten notes, sitting in the back of a car.

In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal.

T-Mobile knows all about about that.

They're now the best network, according to the experts at OoCla Speed Test, and they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

With Supermobile, your performance, security, and coverage are supercharged.

With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand.

With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid.

That's your business, Supercharged.

Learn more at supermobile.com.

Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S.

where you can see the sky.

Best network based on analysis by UCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

There's more to San Francisco with the Chronicle.

There's more food for thought, more thought for food.

There's more data insights to help with those day-to-day choices.

There's more to the weather than whether it's going to rain.

And with our arts and entertainment coverage, You won't just get out more, you'll get more out of it.

At the Chronicle, knowing knowing more about San Francisco is our passion.

Discover more at sfchronicle.com.

In business, they say you can have better, cheaper, or faster, but you only get to pick two.

What if you could have all three at the same time?

That's exactly what Cohere, Thomson Reuters, and specialized bikes have since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

OCI is the blazing fast platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and and AI needs, where you can run any workload in a high availability, consistently high performance environment and spend less than you would with other clouds.

How is it faster?

OCI's block storage gives you more operations per second.

Cheaper?

OCI costs up to 50% less for computing, 70% less for storage, and 80% less for networking.

Better?

In test after test, OCI customers report lower latency and higher bandwidth versus other clouds.

This is the cloud built for AI and all your biggest workloads.

Right now with zero commitment, try OCI for free.

Head to oracle.com slash strategic.

That's oracle.com slash strategic.

So Hussein and his colleagues, they discover that someone had tried to plant a bomb at the rally in Paris.

And at the same time, police in Germany arrest an Iranian man on a highway in Bavaria.

His name is Asadollah Asadi.

and officially he's the third councillor of the Iranian embassy in Vienna.

He arrived in Europe in 2014.

But in reality he's a top spy for Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security.

It's Iran's equivalent of the CIA or MI6.

Asadi is running a network of agents across Europe, meeting them in cafes in small medieval towns and handing over secret instructions or bundles of cash.

And months before the Paris rally, he traveled to Tehran, returning to Europe with a sophisticated bomb hidden in his diplomatic luggage.

The bomb's made from an explosive known as TATP, or Mother of Satan.

It's extremely volatile.

Assadi carries it on to Luxembourg and hands it over to his agents.

And this part of the story, it's a bit less like a Le Carre novel because the venue he chooses, it's a pizza hut.

He gives them the bomb with instructions for planting it at the Paris rally, and the code word he uses is PlayStation.

But what Asadi doesn't know is that European intelligence agencies have been watching his every move and know exactly what he's been planning.

They even disabled the airport security scanner so he could get through.

The two agents are arrested as they travel from Brussels to Paris.

Asadi is pulled over by the police on a motorway in Germany, and in the back of his car, they find a battered red notebook filled with handwritten notes.

Notes that reveal that Assadi was involved in way more than one bomb plot.

Assadi has listed hundreds of different meetings with agents across Europe.

He's itemized cash payments he's made to spies and he's listed more than 200 places he's visited as part of his work in 11 different countries.

Because Assadi, according to the findings of a Belgian criminal court, is part of a secret unit of Iranian foreign intelligence, a sort of murder squad in Europe.

It's called Department 312.

and its role is to kill opponents of the regime abroad.

There's not much public information about Department 312, but what we do know, it's pretty terrifying.

It's thought to be a top-secret unit that specialises in spying on human rights activists, journalists, and others who the Iranian regime believe to be a threat.

But was Ali Mutamid one of their targets.

We know that Asadi arrived in his new job in June 2014, a little over a year before Ali Mutamid was killed outside his house in Almair.

It was the first successful targeted assassination carried out by Iran in Western Europe in over 23 years.

And then two years later, in 2017, while Assadi was still free, another Iranian opposition member was gunned down in the Netherlands.

So we can say that Assadi arrives in Vienna in late 2014.

And then suddenly, Iran is linked to several assassinations in Europe.

This isn't conclusive evidence, but according to the Belgian Criminal Court documents, targeting dissidents, that was Assadi's job.

So it makes sense that he would at least be a suspect in the Mutamid murder.

And we also know that Assadi, he was reporting into really top people in Iran, including the Deputy Minister of Intelligence.

After his arrest for the bomb plot, Asadi is put on trial in Belgium, and he gets prison visits from some of Iran's most senior spies and other officials from its foreign ministry.

They clearly cared a lot about this case.

The criminal case against Assadi was brought by the Belgian government, but there were also 25 others who joined as private plaintiffs.

They were all at the Paris rally, and Hussein was one of them, and it gave him access to all the prosecution's evidence.

He sent me the files.

This is hundreds of pages of documents in several European languages, and there's also extracts from Assadi's red notebook.

And there's something else, something that I think could be important.

Asadi's job meant that he had to travel a lot on work trips across Europe to meet with his various agents.

And it turns out that even spies use Booking.com, the huge online travel agent, to book their hotels.

Or at least Asadi did.

And the details of all those bookings, they're in the files.

So I'm sat here.

in the offices of the Financial Times looking at these records, every hotel Assadi stayed in over his four years operating in Europe.

For some of the bookings, he used his official Iranian Foreign Ministry email address.

For others, it was burner accounts from Yahoo and Gmail.

He seems to have met his agents in some pretty low-key locations, and he often seemed to book two hotels in different places for the same night, maybe thinking it would throw off anyone who was following him.

And the records, they do show that he travelled to the Netherlands.

On the 6th of September 2016, less than a year after Mutamid was murdered, he stayed at the Best Western in The Hague for one night.

The next evening, Asadi booked two hotel rooms, one in the Dutch town of Meppel and another in Svartslus, both really small towns.

And in April 2017, Asadi booked a room at the Savoy Amsterdam for one of his agents.

So we know he was working in the Netherlands at around the same time that Ali Mutamid was murdered.

It's far from a smoking gun, but it's enough.

Enough for me to ask Hussein, does he think that Asadi could have been connected to the murder of Mohammed Reza Kalahi, also known as Ali Mutamid?

I lay out what we know.

So he arrives.

Asadi arrives in Austria in 2014.

And then in 2015, a man called...

Mohamed Reza Kalahi, who was living in a town in Almair, was shot and killed outside his house.

The murder has never been solved.

They know who shot him.

They know who told those people to shoot him.

The Dutch government then said, We believe the Iranian regime was behind this murder, and they expelled two diplomats.

But there's never been any

further information about who could have coordinated a plot like that.

Do you think it's reasonable to assume that a Saudi could have been behind something like that?

Well, I don't have precise information about this case, but

I think it makes sense to believe that, of course,

I mean, when Assadi was the, you know, the head of this intelligence section

in mainly the Western Europe,

I think that is this could very well be I mean, Asadi could very well be behind that.

So it's reasonable to assume, you know, we have a spy working under diplomatic cover who is in charge of all of Western Europe and his focus is

effectively organizing

assassination attempts against opposition figures so it's a reasonable assumption to think that of the assassinations or attempted assassinations that occurred in Western Europe after 2014

he presumably would have had to have some he's had a hand in it

absolutely

what Hussein says of course it doesn't prove anything, but at the very least, Assadi has to be considered a suspect.

There's this new wave of assassinations in Europe, all connected to the Iranian state, and they begin just after Assadi is posted to Vienna in 2014.

And the first is the murder of an electrician in a small Dutch town a year later.

Assadi is convicted for the attempted bombing in Paris and he's sentenced to 20 years for attempted murder and plotting a terrorist attack.

Iran denies any involvement, but will never know if he was involved in Ali Muthamed's death.

Because after Asadi is convicted, a Belgian aid worker is arrested in Iran on these trumped-up charges of espionage and sentenced to 40 years in prison and 74 lashes.

Then, in May 2023, the Belgian government agrees to exchange Assadi for the aid worker.

So, Assadi, he's now back in Iran, and his notebook aside, he's taken his secrets with him.

In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal.

T-Mobile knows all about that.

They're now the best network, according to the experts at OOCLA Speed Test, and they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, security, and seamless satellite coverage.

With Supermobile, your performance, security, and coverage are supercharged.

With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand.

With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid.

That's your business, Supercharged.

Learn more at supermobile.com.

Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S.

where you can see the sky.

Best network based on analysis by OOCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

There's more to San Francisco with the Chronicle.

More to experience and to explore.

Knowing San Francisco is our passion.

Discover more at sfchronicle.com.

Drew and Sue and Eminem's Minis.

And baking the surprise birthday cake for Lou.

And Sue forgetting that her oven doesn't really work.

And Drew remembering that they don't have flour.

And Lou getting home early from work, which he never does.

And Drew and Sue using the rest of the tubes of Eminem's minis as party boppers instead I think this is one of those moments where people say it's the thought that counts M ⁇ Ms it's more fun together

it's the 12th of April 2022 and we're back in Dublin City Hall the entire time John O'Driscoll's been working on a plan to sanction the kinnahans he's been worried about it leaking because he knows that if the news gets out they'll quickly be able to hide their assets before they're frozen.

Today is a landmark day.

But now the Kinahans have run out of time.

And in particular against the Kinnehan organised crime gang.

John's boss Drew Harris, Commissioner of the Irish Police, steps up to the podium.

This organised crime gang started life as a south inner-city Dublin drug dealers but has grown over the decades to become a transnational crime cartel that is estimated to have generated over 1 billion euro for them.

Then a senior official from the US Treasury announces the news that will make headlines around the world.

So, as of today, the Kinahan Transnational Criminal Organization joins the ranks of Italy's Kimora, Mexico's Los Zetas,

Japan's Yakuza,

and Russia's Thieves-in-Law.

Also, as of today, as a result of these sanctions, these individuals are immediately severed from the U.S.

financial system.

And any assets or property under U.S.

jurisdiction are immediately blocked at this moment.

We have to stop here for a

Daniel and his brother Christopher Jr.,

calling their organization a threat to the entire listed economy through its role in international money laundering.

Detective Chief Superintendent Seamus Boland knows that the U.S.

sanctions will destroy the Kinnahans' chance of continuing their life of luxury in Dubai.

Because the dangers with sanctions is that if any legitimate business engages with somebody who's on a sanctions list, they're actually the people who are committing the criminal offences and they risk all their assets being seized and they risk being prosecuted.

So, you know, avenues to live the high life that you would have had before are closed down very, very quickly.

You know, people end up with so much money from cocaine trafficking.

Behind all this, it's all about greed.

You have money to try and live in your big house, drive your fancy car, fly business class all across the world, stay in the best hotels.

What the sanctions actually does is it removes a lot of the facilitation that would be possible for people to live their lives and to benefit from the illicit wealth that they've actually achieved.

Soon, the United Arab Emirates freeze Daniel's assets too, and they impose their own sanctions on the Kinahans in Dubai, removing one of the last places on earth they can hide.

The Kinnahans, they go on the run.

Significant parties within the Kinahan organized crime group all went to ground and have been attempting to to evade justice and hide in the shadows since that date.

But from our own information and intelligence and conversations with other criminals as well, you know, I think this took it to a different level because the criminal underworld in Europe didn't anticipate that sanctions was something that would happen on this side of the Atlantic.

But the strange thing is, it's been more than a year since that big announcement in Dublin.

And the Kinnahans, they're all still at large.

It's not clear where they are.

I've heard multiple rumours.

Some think that they're still in the UAE, living under false identities.

Others think that they're somewhere else in the Middle East, laying low.

I've even heard speculation that they're building connections with Putin's Russia.

So I asked Seamus, why haven't the police been able to bring them in yet?

Well, investigations are still ongoing

as well at the moment.

So the sanctions was only one phase of

a much wider investigation that's continuously ongoing and taking place.

And as was announced in April 2022

at the designation as well,

extradition warrants were in place for one of the principals who sought for charges in relation to murder and directing organized crime.

And that's still outstanding as well.

But you can rest assured that investigations

are continuing actively across many different jurisdictions.

For a few years, the men who gathered at Daniel Kinahan's wedding in 2017 seemed almost invincible.

They created a new model.

stateless gangsters using modern technology to run global mafias in ways that were impossible a few decades before.

But eventually, their reputation caught up with them.

They made the mistake of becoming too public, too brazen.

I began reporting on this story because I think it tells us something important about how the world is changing and the global shifts that made the Dubai Supercartel possible, they're only accelerating.

The criminals of the future, I think they're going to be more global, more sophisticated and more dangerous.

And I think it's going to get harder to tell if someone's a gangster, a businessman, or both.

The story of the Super Cartel for me, it's an ominous sign of these new hybrid threats that democracies face and of governments' weakening ability to fight them.

The sanctions against the Kinahans, they've been hailed as a victory, a landmark in coordinated action by Western governments to take down a major crime group.

But there's something I've kept asking myself.

Were the sanctions a show of strength or really just a sign of weakness?

Some of the world's most powerful governments have teamed up to go after the Kinnahans, but a year later, they're still out there.

So the Dubai supercartel may be finished, but its model will live on.

And perhaps something new and maybe worse will take its place.

In fact, somewhere out there, it probably already has.

Not long before the sanctions were announced, Raffaele Imperiale, the Van Gogh boss, was arrested in Dubai and sent to Italy.

He's since agreed to become a state's witness, and in November 2023, he told Italian prosecutors he would sell off his $80 million private island in Dubai in the hope of his sentence being reduced.

MTK, the boxing company that Daniel Kinahan co-founded, it closes.

And back in the Netherlands, where we began our story, Paul Vucks, the crime reporter, has been able to come out of police protection and return to his normal life.

We want our life back in full.

So, not riding an armoured car, but riding a bike and sitting on a terrace.

Ulase Elian, the local councillor in our mayor who campaigned about the Ali Muthamid murder, well, he's now a national politician.

In 2021, he was elected to the Dutch parliament.

Look, you know, I was like this baby when I got here.

My father had like $20 in his pocket.

The honor of representing the Dutch people, it's massive for me.

My goal in life is defending democracy, defending freedom.

And that relates to the story of my dad and also this story.

Look how dangerous the world around us can be.

And the Kinnahans,

they have to live every day knowing they're being hunted by police.

For Michael O'Sullivan, the man who first arrested Christy Kinnahan in a Dublin flat back in the 1980s, it's it's only a matter of time.

You feel like saying to them, did you not think this day had come by doing what you're doing?

Better people than them have been caught.

And they have made themselves a global target.

And with the DEA on your case, the world is a small place and it gets smaller.

Hot Money is a production of the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries.

It was written and reported by me, Miles Johnson.

If you've got any leads or information about this story, you can email me at newnarcos atft.com.

The series producer is Peggy Sutton.

Edith Russillo is the associate producer.

Fact-Checking is by Arthur Gompertz.

Engineering by Sarah Bruguer, Sound Design from Jake Gorski, Jeremy Walmsley wrote the original music, our editor is Sarah Nix, and the executive producers are Jacob Goldstein and Cheryl Brumley.

Special thanks to Rilla Calaff, Laura Dubois, Peter Spiegel, Tofa Forge, Manuela Saragoza, Breen Turner, John Schnaz, Jacob Weisberg, Alistair Mackey, Laura Clark, Nigel Hansen, Paolo Pasquale, Minnie Advinkula, Dan Dombey, Tom Braithwaite, Rhonda Taylor, Matt Veller, Alex Barker, Patricia Nilsson, Matt Garrahan, Madison Marriage, Paul Murphy, Rich Ward, Arlie Adlington, Marsha Woolraven, Jude Weber, Carrie Brodie, Eric Sandler, Nicole Optenbosch, Christina Sullivan, Vicki Merrick, Jake Flanagan, and Greta Cohn.

This is Jonas Knox from Two Pros and a Cup of Joe, and on Fox One, now you can stream your favorite live sports so you can be there live for the biggest moments.

That means NFL Sundays, college football games, NASCAR, MLB postseason, and more.

With Fox One, you'll get it all live: edge of your seat plays, jaw-dropping, high-octane moments, and that feeling like you're right there in the action.

Fox One, we live for live, streaming now.

This is Justin Richmond, host of Broken Record.

Starbucks pumpkin spice latte arrives at the end of every summer like a pick-me-up to save us from the dreary return from our summer breaks.

It reminds us that we're actually entering the best time of year, fall.

Fall is when music sounds the best.

Whether listening on a walk with headphones or in a car during your commute, something about the fall foliage makes music hit just a little closer to the bone.

And with the pumpkin spice latte now available at Starbucks, made with real pumpkin, you can elevate your listening and your taste all at the same time.

The Starbucks pumpkin spice latte.

Get it while it's hot or iced.

I'm Bretzki and you're in California and I'm here to tell you about SpinQuest.com, my favorite social casino.

With over a thousand slots and table games absolutely free with the ability to win real cash prizes instantly to your bank account, there's no better time to hop on our $30 coin package for only $10 deal.

Head over today.

I love you.

I'll see you there.

SpinQuest is a free-to-play social casino.

Voidwear Prohibited.

Visit SpinQuest.com for more details.

This is an iHeart Podcast.