Episode 7 - Against the Ropes

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Previously on hot money,

US undercover agents made a connection between money launderers working for European drug traffickers and top-level officials in Iran.

It was part of a scheme to help the regime evade American sanctions and source heavy weapons.

This time, a whole new money laundering operation comes into view, invented by the man at the top of the Dubai Supercartel, Daniel Kinahan.

Back in episode four, we left him living a life of luxury in Dubai.

He'd just got married and business was booming as the supercartel joined forces to grow their trafficking operations across Europe.

And Daniel, his new career as a boxing manager, was about to take off.

Remember back in Spain, he helped open a gym called MTK and signed up-and-coming boxers from Ireland in the UK.

He set them up in nice villas and hired the best trainers and arranged their fights.

Unlike his father, Daniel appeared to like being a public figure, to revel in the attention he got.

He was living a dual life, enjoying the status of a top drug trafficker.

and the image of a high-flying boxing promoter.

It seemed to me that he thought boxing was his path to being accepted as a legitimate businessman, but something inside him meant he just couldn't leave the world of crime behind.

Now it's 2020.

Daniel Kinahan's in Dubai and he's taken his boxing promotion business there with him.

He's working on the biggest boxing deal of his life and if he pulls it off, it will catapult him to the very top of the sport.

Hello there!

I'm just after getting off the phone with Daniel Kinahan.

That's world famous heavyweight champion Tyson Fury.

He's a fast-talking, shaven-headed, 19-stone man-mountain and on that afternoon he's even more excitable than usual.

He posts on social media.

He's just informed me that the biggest fight in British boxing history has just been agreed.

Get up there, my boy!

Big shout out, Dan.

He got this done.

Two-fight deal.

Tyson Fury versus Anthony Joshua

next year.

The announcement, it stuns the world of boxing.

After winning a world heavyweight title five years earlier, Fury's career has been in a slump.

But since meeting Daniel Kinahan, he's made an epic comeback.

He's beaten the previously undefeated and reigning WBC champion Deontay Wilder in this huge Las Vegas showdown.

And that means Fury's upcoming bout against fellow British heavyweight Anthony Joshua is immediately billed as one of the biggest fights in the history of the sport.

It's going to be an international extravaganza broadcast across the world.

Pay-per-view sales and sponsorship are going to generate hundreds of millions of dollars.

And Fury, he's crediting Daniel Kinahan with pulling the whole thing together.

And Daniel's not only organising these box office prize fights, he's also started to rub shoulders with royalty.

Around the same time that Fury's fights announced, Daniel signed up as a special advisor on combat sports by a company belonging to the Prince of Bahrain.

The press release describes him as an an international boxing power broker.

And shortly before that, Daniel shows up at a charity gala in Kazakhstan wearing a tuxedo.

And sitting next to him is none other than Bob Aram, one of the most influential figures in boxing history.

Aram, he's promoted Muhammad Ali and he's an inductee into the Boxing Hall of Fame.

We have great confidence in Kinahan.

We think he's very, very, very honest, very astute.

He has great connections.

And now he's singing the praises of Daniel Kinahan.

You know, I like to deal with guys, no-nonsense people, whose word is their bond.

And that's what it's been with Daniel.

But just as Daniel Kinahan's reputation as a boxing magnate starts to soar, some people are starting to look more closely at the source of his fortune.

I'm Miles Johnson and from the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries, this is Hot Money Season 2, The New Narcos.

Episode 7, Against the Ropes.

The thing that first pulled me into this story was when a source told me: if you really want to understand the exploding European cocaine trade, you need to take a close look at a murder in a small Dutch town.

And that led me to an Amsterdam murder broker, a Dublin safe house, the Kinahans, and then the Iranian government.

For a while, the way this connection worked just wasn't clear.

And then we found something.

The thing that links these unlikely characters together is the mechanics of sanctions evasion and money laundering.

But if anyone can help me really understand how all of this works, it's a guy called Quentin Mugg.

I'm a French police commander.

I am currently working in Europol, which is the European Agency for Criminal Police.

I first met Quentin after other police contacts told me that he was one of the best in the world at complex money laundering cases.

He's got dark floppy hair, a stubbly beard, and he talks with the unassuming calmness of a Gallic Colombo.

He doesn't miss a trick.

If you're trying to launder your drugs money in a shipment of seafood, he's the sort of guy who'll swivel around at the last minute and say, just one more thing.

You know, instinct kicks in.

You tell me that you imported 100,000 Euros worth of shrimps, but what shrimp was that?

Live shrimp, frozen shrimp, big shrimps, Madagascar shrimps.

What was exactly in the container, you don't know.

That's how it works.

Quentin, he lives and breathes this sort of stuff, and he's actually written a book about it.

It's called Argent Sales, or Dirty Money.

So I started to pick up on this aspect of the job, because essentially everybody wakes up for money, including the criminals.

And I really started to enjoy it.

Quentin actually worked on part of the DEA's investigation into Iman Kobezi and ended up arresting a French associate of hers.

He says there's one important reason why drug traffickers might end up working with someone like Kobezi.

Criminals and sanctioned governments, they've got a problem in common.

They can't just freely move money around the international banking system.

So both need to find more creative methods, methods that law enforcement agencies can't track.

And that is the beauty of it, to be honest, because basically this

appeal for anonymity is something that the whole underworld has in common.

As the cocaine market in Europe has boomed, massive amounts of dirty cash have started to pile up.

And to make their businesses work, to pay suppliers in Latin America, pay henchmen or buy a mansion in Dubai, the cartels they need to keep that money from getting stuck.

It's a critical logistical headache of being a drug trafficker.

But moving billions secretly around the world, it's actually quite hard.

Imagine a drug trafficker has, say, $10 million in the Netherlands.

And he would like that to be in Dubai.

So now he's got a number of options.

He could move it himself so that means having some cash couriers taking the risk of being spotted at the airport.

He could try to transform it into something else,

maybe jewelry, watches, whatever, but again you need to transport it.

He could try to hide his tracks by converting that money into other goods, such as cars, and then ship them away, get the cars somewhere in another country, sell them, justify the profit and take it away.

But then you need companies, you need imports, but it's complicated.

Or you can just pick up your phone.

Pick up your phone and call a money broker.

They're specialists who operate in a huge underground banking system and it's critical infrastructure for the underworld.

So I would simply contact the money broker.

The money broker would send me a money collector.

That money collector will come to me, usually with a banknote.

It's pretty hard to feel comfortable handing over massive suitcases of cash to a stranger.

So they've come up with a sort of verification system.

The person picking up the cash, they have to show a serial number of a specific banknote to prove their identity.

And within two or three days I would have an equivalent amount of money in the country I want.

So it's sort of like a secret currency exchange service, but for major criminals.

But the concept that took me a little while to get my head around is that the actual physical cash, it doesn't ever move.

It stays in the same place.

The networks have supplies of cash in different countries, in places like warehouses.

And instead of moving it, they simply pay you out from the supply they have in the place you need it, minus a commission of course.

This works because people doing the reverse trade to you, customers moving money in the other direction, they'll replenish the supply of cash from where you collected it, at one of the network's de facto offices around the world.

The most basic often comes in the form of a little shop or little grocery store that opens late and sell very expensive apples and then everybody goes, but how is it possible that it's still open?

Well, that's a hint.

Before I'd heard about this, I'd assumed that modern money laundering was high-tech, using things like cryptocurrencies or complex financial instruments.

I was actually really surprised to learn that it's pretty old school.

Quentin says that this modern shadow banking system, it's similar to the principles of hawala networks that were used by Eastern traders from the 14th century.

So the Hawala system is basically a very ancient system that consists in,

it's based on trust, and it's based on a network of hawaladars, people running this kind of informal network.

It was used a long time ago, even in the Middle Ages, when you were traveling, you didn't want to

wander around the roads with gold on you.

So what you would do, you would make a deposit in the merchant who has an agreement with

his suppliers, let's say, I don't know, it's the Middle East.

And then, when you would arrive there, you would choose a note and somebody would give you an equivalent amount of money

based on trust.

I'm also just interested in the capacity of these systems because we're talking hundreds of millions, if not billions, potentially, of

money.

Is the liquidity that deep that you can

move that much money through through this stuff?

It's going to be a short answer.

Yes.

Wow.

It is deep.

So there are billions of dollars circulating through these black market brokers.

And it's not just drug barons who are using them.

There are tax evaders, human traffickers, warlords, terrorist groups, and people moving money for sanctioned governments.

There's this strange thing in Europe, and it's that the number of physical banknotes in circulation over the last decade, it's actually gone up.

But the number of people paying for stuff with cash, it's gone down.

And central banks, they can have a pretty hard time knowing where all of that physical cash has gone.

In the UK alone, the Bank of England, it believes that there's about £50 billion in cash in circulation, but it just can't be accounted for.

No one knows where it is.

And meanwhile, Quentin's seeing signs that the number of money brokers is going up.

I've seen the commission drop.

It's not a good sign

because they're asking for less and less money.

That means that there are more and more competitors and there is more and more money out there.

Like Quentin said at the start, everybody in the world of crime wake up for money.

And over in the United States, one lawyer is starting to dig deeper into the Kinahan money machine in the Middle East.

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Daniel Kinahan is living in Dubai.

They're having a party in Dubai.

They're getting away with a lot of stuff.

It seems to be in Dubai, and he felt, I think, untouchable.

Eric Montalvo is an attorney in Washington, D.C.

And before getting into law, he served for 21 years as an active duty Marine in the U.S.

military in the first Gulf War in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

When I transitioned into the civilian community, I eventually started my firm in 2011 and I practice national and international law.

And then one day in 2020, Eric got a call from a boxing promoter who was furious.

One of the promoter's most successful fighters was leaving.

He'd switched to another promotion company, one called MTK.

It's the company that Daniel Kinahan co-founded back in Spain.

And by 2021, MTK Global, like Daniel, is based in Dubai.

MTK has become a major player in the boxing world.

And this fighter, he wants to move over to them, but he's still under contract.

So there's a dispute.

And the current promoter asks Eric to take on his case.

Before this, I was not really a boxing litigator, if you will.

Like the boxing profession was not something that I was intimately familiar with in terms of the the business side, right?

You know, I'm a fan, I would watch a fight, you know, what have you, But I really had never got from a litigation standpoint into the back end of what was going on.

So I really was in a learning curve on this.

Eric starts studying the contracts.

And MTK looks just like any other multinational company.

On its face, it looked very legitimate and very powerful compared to even any U.S.

company.

No one could really compete with them.

And they had endorsements from high-level boxing professionals, right?

Bob Arum.

So my first review of them was that they were a big professional boxing corporation, international, and that I just had to hold them accountable for contract issues.

But then, Eric comes across the name Daniel Kinahan.

At the time, back in 2021, most of the boxing world had embraced Kinahan as a legitimate businessman, but Eric saw something else.

When I focused in on him,

obviously, I'm a former prosecutor, so you know

that

got my eyebrows raised.

Now, there's a long history in boxing of people with, let's say, a colorful past.

And initially, Eric thought that the rumors around Daniel Kinahan would have no bearing on the contractual dispute.

But as Eric started to look at MTK's business model, it seemed strange.

One of the ways that the company was able to recruit so many fighters to its roster was by offering them hugely favourable terms, terms that seemed to defy financial logic.

When I started trying to understand the financials of what was happening, nothing made sense.

No business can spend the amount of money in litigation,

you know, fighter bonuses, all of these things

when that money is not coming from fights.

For example, you could have a situation where a boxer makes say $500,000 in a fight, but the boxing company promoting them pays them $700,000.

Where's that money coming from?

Daniel Kinahan had officially parted ways with MTK back in 2017.

His links to organized crime had made it difficult to be the public face of the company.

Everyone's paying attention to you, probably for a good reason.

So, you know, take a back seat and you're no longer part of MTK.

The problem is, is that Mr.

Kinnahan wasn't able to do that.

He either loved the boxing game, loved the limelight,

whatever it was, but he could not help himself.

And so he was publicly coming out over and over again and participating in the fighting arena.

And as Eric digs deeper into MTK's finances, he discovers that the company seems to have found an innovative way of moving money around the globe.

It became clear to me as a prosecutor that what they were doing is they were using the fighters as a way to move money through the system.

And so preliminarily, what I see is that let's say they put a million dollars in the fighter's account, that wasn't for the fighter to keep.

What it was was they would then take that money out a month or two later,

and then it would go to a property or it would go to some other venture from the fighter's account.

And these were typically new accounts.

So, the fighter would set up a new account.

There would be a very significant amount of money coming in to the account, and then then that money would leave shortly thereafter and, you know, go to pay for some other thing that's unrelated to the fighter or anything else.

So

that is money laundering.

Let's stop here for a moment.

Because what Eric claims is happening, using boxing to launder money, it's a pretty serious allegation.

Up until now, most people have seen Daniel Kinahan's rise in boxing as an attempt to clean up his reputation.

But maybe, if Eric's right, it was more than that.

The boxing and the crime, they weren't two different worlds.

They were part of the same thing.

Eric's next move is to file a legal case in California for his client.

It says MTK is quote, overseen by Mr.

Daniel Kinahan and that Kinahan started MTK to quote, launder ill-gotten gains from drug trafficking.

It was part of a civil claim seeking seeking compensation from MTK.

MTK responds, it strongly denies what it called wild allegations and it says, MTK Global is not a front for a European drug cartel, does not engage in money laundering and does not make money from the sale of illicit drugs.

It also denied having any ongoing ties to Daniel Kinahan.

We should also be clear that there's no suggestion that the boxers associated with MTK were involved in any criminal activity.

At the time, Eric's theory wasn't a popular one.

Most of the people that were around me that knew what I was doing thought I was a little bit of a crackpot, right?

Like, you know, what are you talking about?

Like, first of all, MTK's legitimate, you know, organization.

I mean, people were saying this, Bob Aaron was saying it, the California Commission was saying it.

Everybody was like, you know, this Montalvo guy is crazy and all of this stuff.

You're going up in this instance against

people who at the time

are

seen as extremely dangerous, you know, like some of the most dangerous criminals in the whole world,

people who are linked to multiple, multiple homicides.

And I was just wondering what you were sort of thinking at the time about that part of it.

I mean, in terms of my own personal safety or in terms of

maybe I'm not,

you know,

the most normal person in the world, but I mean, you know,

I went to war at 20, right?

I'm not going to not do what I have to do because I'm afraid that somehow, shape or form, someone's going to want me dead because I'm complaining about what they're doing.

You know, I just, if that's the case, I shouldn't be an attorney, right?

To start the U.S.

legal case against Kinahan, they're going to have to find him so they can serve him the papers.

And finding a man who's been busy evading law enforcement agencies for years, it might sound a bit tricky, but Eric had a plan.

There's two of them.

They're two man-made islands jutting out from the coast of Dubai, both engineered in the shape of palm trees, so that each luxury property has its own waterfront.

And if you have the amount of money that Mr.

Kinahan has access to and the pictures and everything else you see,

it made sense that he was likely living on one of those islands.

So, Eric, he'd figured out where Daniel Kinahan was living in Dubai, and he'd hired someone to go and deliver the U.S.

court papers to his address.

Now, the next question was, how would Daniel respond?

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So Daniel's figuring out how to deal with this legal case against him.

And at the same time, there are now signs that Dubai, once a paradise for European criminals, has begun to crack down.

The first members of the super cartel are starting to fall.

Riduan Targi, one of the guests at Daniel Kinahan's wedding and a notorious Dutch cocaine boss, he's arrested in Dubai and charged with multiple murders, and the Emirate agrees to send him back to the Netherlands to face trial.

Another wedding guest, the Chilean trafficker known as El Rico, he's arrested in Latin America and extradited to the Netherlands too.

Daniel Kinahan's still safe in Dubai, but the pressure back in Ireland is starting to build.

There's outrage in the Irish parliament the day after Tyson Fury posts about Kinahan arranging the Joshua fight.

Leo Varedkar, Ireland's T-Sook, the Prime Minister, he says he's taken aback by Kinnehan's involvement, citing his checkered past.

He asks Ireland's foreign ministry to talk to the UAE government about it urgently.

Days later, the Prince of Bahrain dumps Kinahan as an advisor, and Bob Aram announces that he's going to handle Tyson Fury's negotiations from now on, not Daniel Kinahan.

Daniel's now on the back foot, and he makes a kind of surprising decision.

He launches a public relations campaign to save his reputation as a legitimate businessman.

A bizarre film appears on the internet called The Regency, Discover the Truth.

And this isn't some cobbled-together home video.

It's a professional project.

It's a dramatic reenactment of the assassination attempt against Daniel in 2016 in Dublin.

It features a handsome actor playing him who's portrayed as the victim in the whole thing.

When Daniel Kinahan arrived at the Wayan for Clash of the Clans, the first thing that he noticed was that there were no Garda to police the event.

This was unnerving, because Daniel was used to having his every move shadowed by police.

Not only that.

It's unlikely the film convinced anyone, but it showed that Daniel Kinahan was starting to get nervous.

Back in Dublin, Jon O'Driscoll, the man in charge of Ireland's response to the Kinahans' wave of violence, He's been watching Daniel's rise in boxing with frustration.

The sport of boxing, which is very important, important and I knew it to be so having policed in inner-city communities for many years, many kids were diverted from crime through an involvement in the sport of boxing and here we saw the Kinnehan organization potentially destroying that sport.

They were corrupting the sport and that was operating at a global level.

John's been trying to come up with a plan, a plan to take the Kinnehans down.

But even if they build a bulletproof case, there's another problem.

The Kinnahans are in Dubai, and Dubai has no formal extradition agreement with Ireland.

John, he realizes something.

That no one entity, no one law enforcement entity could ever achieve any realistic success on its own in tackling one of these criminal enterprises.

So John starts flying around the world, meeting with other law enforcement agencies, sharing information, discussing strategies.

He knows that back in 2010, police across Europe tried to stop the Kinahans with Operation Shovel, but the case had fallen apart.

And John, he's determined that will never happen again.

He needs a silver bullet.

Then, one morning, he's talking to a US official when they mentioned something that John just hadn't thought about before.

Something the US government has used to go after people in countries like Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

Countries in which Western governments can't just go in and arrest people.

Places like Dubai.

What if, the official asked John, they put the Kinnehans under economic sanctions?

The Irish police may not be able to get close to the Kinahans in Dubai, but if the US Treasury put them under sanctions, that would cut them off from their money, the motive for being in crime in the first place.

From that day, it was part of our objective that we would acquire sufficient information to provide to the US Department of Treasury to encourage it to take on the Kinahans as a target for them to be placed on their list of priorities.

It was just an idea, but it was a radical one.

A new tool to target individuals connected to European organised crime.

John immediately gets to work.

He needs to bring in as many international partners into the operation as possible.

But to convince the US Treasury to take action, the joint operation, it needs watertight evidence that the Kinnehans have evolved into a global threat.

Throughout the process, I would have been privy to the intelligence that we had gathered ourselves in Ireland and then other jurisdictions had gathered additional information and bit by bit the jigsaw has been put together in terms of establishing how significant in fact the Kinnehans were on the global stage.

Months and months pass, with countless meetings between law enforcement agencies from different countries sharing the intelligence they've gathered on the Kinahans.

And then, the US side of the joint operation, they discover something pretty big.

At the time, it was a closely guarded piece of highly sensitive information.

John tells me it was something about how the Kinnehans and other members of the Dubai Supercartel had been laundering their money.

About the money brokers that we heard about earlier in the episode.

As time emerged, and as the eyes of U.S.

law enforcement more generally were focused on the Kinhans,

it was realized that the money laundering associated with that drugs empire involved the Kenhans utilizing organizations that may potentially have links to international terrorism.

As we're talking, as John's telling me this, I want to know what he means, which international terrorists?

Is it a group?

Is it a government?

But when you say terrorist-related activity, does that relate to any particular countries?

John doesn't really answer this, so I ask him directly.

The thing I'm thinking, the thing you might be thinking too, is he talking about Iran?

Well, that would be a conclusion that would be reached primarily by the US authorities having been satisfied,

having received initially information from the Irish law enforcement, UK law enforcement, and they then

pursuing that line of inquiry would then have

concluded that in fact there is potential, that there is a financing of activity that could be associated with the Iranian state.

John's saying it in a guarded way, but here's what it sounds like to me.

It's the money, the money laundering.

That's the connection between the Kinahans, the super cartel and Iran.

And Udi Levi, the former head of the Mossad's economic warfare unit, he says the same thing.

He tells me that Iran's money laundering channels are regularly used by criminal networks across the world, as well as other sanctioned governments.

The sanction caused the Iranian to be very creative.

To find, I think today, the number one in the world how to circumvent the sanction, how to build

very, very

smart

way to laundering money.

They are giving suggestions to the Russian and other countries and the North Korean how to circumvent the sanction.

They became so expert.

They know very well how to do it.

And as we know, it's not just sanctioned regimes that need to find secret ways of moving money around the world.

No,

the direct trafficking need the ideas and the way how to

build infrastructure that nobody identify.

So, and the Iranian have today,

I think, the best infrastructure in the world to transfer money from one point to the other and that nobody will identify it.

So not only that they are using the direct trafficking, but they even making the world, let's say, more bad by

allow the cartels and the drug trafficker to use their infrastructure to transfer money.

I really haven't come across any evidence that the members of the super cartel are connected to Iran for ideological reasons.

It's likely it was just business.

The money laundering, it was a service, one that worked.

But having access to new and sophisticated ways to move money, it made the rise of stateless drug traffickers like the super cartel possible.

And this connection, could it be the thing that explains how the super cartel got involved in the assassination of Ali Muthamed?

Udi says the Ali Mutamid assassination, it fits with the pattern he's seen of Iran using organized criminals to target their enemies abroad.

I think Iran is not alone.

I think today is the new trend by

some,

let's say, intelligence forces that it's easier

sometimes cheaper to use drug dealers and criminals to make assassination

because if they caught

you cannot blame Iran you can blame drug trafficking it's something that related to drug trafficking they are preferred to go to criminals and to drug dealers to pay them money to give them guidance and to send them to the mission but I still have a big question is it possible to find out who in Iran worked with the super cartel to assassinate Ali Mutamed to solve this murder?

Yes, but it will be a little bit difficult because they are not stupid.

In most of the cases, they are putting a buffer between themselves and

the last end, let's say something like that.

Let's say the Iranian from Kudzforce agent will

approach to someone, that he will approach to somebody else, and then he will approach to the third party and will give him the mission.

To find someone buried deep in a shadowy hidden world where espionage and organized crime meet, it seems impossible.

And then I came across a case.

A top Iranian spy arrested in Europe, found with a red notebook full of secrets.

And perhaps, inside that notebook, we can find the answer.

That's next time on our season finale of Hot Money.

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 Wormsley 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 Mackey, and Brian Turner.

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