Episode 4 - Gangster's Paradise

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Previously on Hot Money, Daniel Kinahan took over the family business, launched his career as a boxing promoter and waged a bloody war on the streets of Dublin.

Europe was no longer safe for him.

Back in 2021, I was working for the FT as a foreign correspondent in Italy.

One morning, I noticed this story that was causing a bit of a stir.

One of Italy's most wanted fugitives, this guy on the run, he'd given an interview to a local Naples newspaper and his name was Raffaele Imperiale.

This interview, it was a pretty audacious move because at the time he was wanted on drug trafficking charges and was thought to be tied to the Neapolitan Camora Mafia.

And Imperiale, he looked like this classic mob character.

He wore finely tailored clothes and expensive leather shoes.

But the thing that really grabbed my attention was his nickname, the Van Gogh boss.

Well, that's Van Gogh if you're listening in the US, but Van Gogh boss doesn't really sound as good.

It came from a story that began in 2002, when these criminals sledgehammered their way into the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in the middle of the night.

In less than five minutes, they lifted two priceless paintings off the walls, abseiled down the building and disappeared into the night.

The robbery made headlines around the world and was listed by the FBI as one of the most notable art thefts of the 21st century.

The thieves, they were eventually caught, but the paintings were long gone.

They were sold to an unknown buyer and for years no one knew where the van Goghs could be.

And then, in 2016, an Italian public prosecutor got a letter.

It was from Raffaele Imperiale, who was by then living on the run in Dubai.

Imperiale told the Italians that he was the guy who bought the stolen van Goghs, and he was willing to come back and face the charges against him, but he wanted to trade the paintings in for a lighter sentence.

It didn't work out.

The Italians weren't interested, and soon enough, the police raided a property outside of Naples and recovered the paintings.

That interview with Imperiale, a lot of it was about the Van Goghs.

What could a mobster know about art, he was asked.

Was he aware about how valuable they were?

It seemed to slightly annoy him.

He tells the interviewer that he's a man of culture and refined taste, and that he was raised to appreciate fine painting.

I'd never seen anything like it before.

If the most wanted man in Italy was freely giving interviews, why hadn't the police caught him yet?

But what I hadn't grasped was that Imperiale had become a sort of trailblazer.

He was a guy who spotted a big opportunity in the Middle East before everyone else.

Because around the same time that the police seized his stolen van Goghs, the top drug traffickers from around Europe were looking out for a new, safe place to base their operations.

And they settled on the same city that Imperiale, the Van Gogh boss, had chosen back in 2010, the tiny Gulf Emirate of Dubai.

Imperiale had seen that Dubai was the dream location for a man like him.

And soon, the Kinnahans and other top bosses in Europe would be following him out to the Middle East.

Alone, each of these men were ruthless and cunning operators.

But once they're all together in Dubai, they begin to pool their resources.

They came to realize that by forming a new type of criminal group, they could become richer, more powerful and more feared than their wildest dreams.

They were about to transform organized crime in Europe and create the super cartel.

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

Episode 4, Gangsters Paradise.

I see Dubai as a bit of a combination between Manhattan, Miami, and Beverly Hills.

Matthew Page used to work for the US government in several three-letter agencies.

Now he's an analyst and an author who studies corruption and kleptocracy at the Carnegie Endowment.

He co-edited a report on Dubai that helped me understand why people like Raffaele Imperiale love living there.

Matthew says Dubai, first of all, is a bit like Manhattan.

Right, you know, Manhattan because it's got that sort of elite skyscraper type of feel to it.

Beverly Hills, sort of that conspicuous consumption, the bling, the, the,

if it wasn't so hot, they'd have furs, but they certainly have the Bentleys and haute couture.

And then also Miami because of the climate, the beaches, the beautiful people.

In that newspaper interview, Imperiale says his life in Dubai is nothing fancy.

But I've got hold of an Italian police file on him that tells a different story.

It's based on wiretaps, informant testimony, financial documents and information shared by police around the world.

It paints this portrait of him strutting around Dubai, wearing expensive suits, tailored in his native Naples, and always trailed by three bodyguards.

Dubai is somewhere he can flash his cash in the company of other wealthy people who are doing exactly the same thing.

There are pictures in a high-end restaurant with his much younger girlfriend draping her arms around him.

And he's wearing an an open-necked white shirt and a smart jacket.

It's got selfies he took at the gym, flexing his muscles.

He drives custom-made supercars with conspicuous two-letter license plates.

And he's also developed an expensive diamond habit.

He buys jewelry for his girlfriends at the Graf jewelry store and jokes to his friends that he has a motto, no graph, no love.

For a while, he lives in the Bergella Arab.

the luxury hotel where Daniel Kinahan will soon celebrate his wedding.

The Italian press report that he and his entourage are often found at a club called Provocateur inside Dubai's Four Seasons Hotel.

It's his sort of place.

It's guest list only with leather seats, bottle service and a huge custom seating light that looks like a giant diamond.

And Imperiale has this reputation as a lavish spender.

He buys dozens of bottles of crystal at thousands of dollars.

and then picks up the entire tab and leaves a very generous tip.

But it's not just a great place to party, it's also a fantastic place for him to do business.

Because in Dubai, alongside the beautiful people and the very rich, are the powerful and the dangerous.

Someone once told me that the best way to describe Dubai is sort of like a bling version of the cantino in Star Wars, full of these strange and shadowy characters from around the world.

You have hedge fund managers and professional athletes drinking at the same bars as Russian oligarchs and cocaine kingpins.

It could be an Afghan warlord who has

taken all the money that he made during the Karzai regime.

And now that the Taliban is back in control, kind of can't go back to the fiefdom that he once ruled.

The Instagram influencer who makes their living taking pictures of themselves on fabulous yachts.

It could be the sort of nerdy but indispensable, sort of pasty British accountant who provides the services that these individuals need and legitimizes them.

It could be people like Isabel Dos Santos, former head of Angola's national oil company and whose father was the former president.

And she's basically on the run from international law enforcement.

And that's not to mention the local elites, right?

The royal family, the ruling family, cousins and nephews and grandchildren who are the most powerful people in this country.

To understand why Dubai was the perfect place for a bunch of international drug lords to join forces, you need to know a little bit about its history.

It's part of the United Arab Emirates, a federation made up of seven neighboring monarchies.

Before the UAE gained independence in 1971, the region was a British colony and an important source of oil.

But the oil belongs to Dubai's Emirati neighbor, Abu Dhabi.

So when the British left and the UAE was born, Dubai needed to find ways to diversify its economy.

And it was really a tiny place with just

a few tens of thousands of people until the 1980s and 1990s when it saw an explosive growth.

So the royal family in Dubai really had a vision of how to transform the Emirate by building lots of

world-class infrastructure,

power, roads, airport, seaport.

And it wasn't just infrastructure.

The royal family also invested in some of the most luxurious real estate in the world.

Dubai today is now full of skyscrapers and gated communities.

Some of them are built on these artificial sand islands that stretch out into the Persian Gulf.

If you've never seen them before, they're pretty surreal.

There's one in the shape of a palm tree.

There's another archipelago that replicates a map of the world.

And they're isolated, which means for the rich and the powerful, They feel safe.

When Imperiale moves to Dubai, he starts to make huge investments in property, and he doesn't settle for anything but the very best.

He buys the island on the archipelago that's shaped like Taiwan, worth an estimated $80 million.

He begins a project to build 10 luxury villas worth $20 million each.

And, according to a police file, he tried to get Zaha Hadid, the critically acclaimed architect, to design them.

Because in Dubai, he can spend that sort of money without too many questions being asked.

Dubai is like a membrane.

It's where the sort of brackish 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 that really captures Dubai in a nutshell.

It's a place where these different flows merge and mix and just generally come out cleaner and sweeter smelling than they came in.

But Dubai has also been an island of stability in a region that, otherwise, from the perspective of the West, has been pretty unstable.

And so in the 1990s, a lot of Western banks and other companies, they chose Dubai as their base in the region.

But at the same time,

its own

system of rules has been kept loose and fungible enough to allow the penetration of a lot of unexplained wealth, illicit funds, into the country.

And as a result, it served as a magnet for those types of funds.

The fact that there's lots of people who want to move there, presumably that has also resulted in spring up of financial and technical kind of infrastructure to support people bringing money from all around the world.

Absolutely.

So these include, you know, high-end estate agents, you know, the people who, again, manage those transactions, the accountants, the conveyors, and so forth.

It involves lawyers and maybe PR consultants as well, and people who are essentially functioning as wealth managers and helping you,

often within the bounds of what is legal, avoid tax

and optimize the wealth that you have gained.

without necessarily questioning what the source of that wealth is.

I mean, if you think about it, the international financial system, as 21st century as it is with, you know, contactless payment and instant transactions around the globe is still a very sort of almost like 18th century element to it.

You know, there's a lot of trust involved.

There's a lot of essentially taking people at their word that the money that they've acquired is legitimate.

In countries like the US or the UK, if you suddenly turn up to a bank with a million dollars in a suitcase, they might get a little twitchy.

But in Dubai, according to Matthew, very few questions are asked about where your cash comes from.

They're just looking for ways essentially to take that wealth off you, you know, and

in exchange for a luxury apartment or a high-end car or looking to provide services to you, an extraordinarily high net worth individual, whether you be a Silicon Valley, you you know, multi-billionaire who earned your money legitimately, or you're a drug trafficking kingpin from Europe.

So there's sort of a whole universe of sort of like 21st-century Gatsby's, like people who've sort of come to escape their past in a way, or at least like sort of set up shop, you know, as a new type of person with lots of money where people don't ask any questions.

Yeah, and it's a way in which wealth can be

traded or exchanged for elite status, right?

Places like Oxford and Cambridge used to be that for global elites 100 years ago, right?

This is the 21st century answer to that, and it's all about conspicuous consumption, you know, Instagram selfies and an ill-gotten wealth.

But there's another very important part to living in Dubai that even the bloodiest crime bosses understand.

You might be murdering people or shipping industrial quantities of drugs somewhere else, but you don't commit violent crime in Dubai.

And that means, for a city inhabited by some of the scariest men on the planet, it's pretty safe.

There are very few robberies or murders.

So why is Imperiale always walking around Dubai with bodyguards?

Well the thing is, he tells his friends that his henchmen, they're not there to protect him.

They're there to protect others in case he gets angry.

Because in Dubai, you've got to keep your temper under control.

And if you do that, then most of the time, the authorities there, they'll leave you alone.

At the time, Dubai doesn't have extradition agreements with a lot of other countries.

So even if you do get in trouble, it's very hard for the police to actually get you.

And that means, for the Kinnahans, Dubai will be like the Costa del Sol, but even better.

More luxurious, lower risk, and way beyond the reach of European law enforcement.

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So Daniel Kienahan arrives in Dubai in 2016, not long after the attempt on his life at the Regency Hotel.

And his family moves there too, his father Christie, and his brother Christopher Jr.

Corporate documents and property files, they show that Christie wasted very little time in setting up a bunch of companies, usually in the name of Christopher Vincent, leaving off the Kinnahan.

He reinvents himself as a commodities trader and a business consultant.

He sets up social media accounts for his companies and he tweets out news about the oil market and Tesla's earning results.

He even follows the FT on there.

And he sets up a new LinkedIn under his fake identity.

And he describes himself as an executive with a view to expanding my companies and an eye for detail.

He lists his skills, skills that you would probably expect a crime boss to have, such as negotiation and strategic planning.

And actually, many of his top business contacts, people like Imperiale, guys he's known for years through the European cocaine market, they're all out there with him.

It's around this time that different police forces, they start to see that something pretty big is happening in Dubai.

At the start, They only get little snippets of meetings and deals.

They learn that the Kinahans and Imperiale, they're spending more time together.

And other notorious kingpins, they seem to be part of the same group.

Riduan Targi, he shows up in Dubai.

He's a Dutch Moroccan crime boss who's linked to multiple murders.

There's also a Chilean called Richard Roquelme Vega.

He's nicknamed El Rico or the rich guy.

Under the giant diamond in provocateur in five-star restaurants and high-end hotels, these gangsters, they start to form a sort of consortium.

It's a powerful new alliance.

And European police, they believe that by 2017, they've seized control of a third of the continent's cocaine market.

That's a business worth billions of dollars a year.

And that's how they earn the name

the Super Cartel.

Like any criminal conspiracy, it's not easy to get a clear picture of how it works.

I've tried to piece it together.

a sort of tapestry of information.

But the documents I've got, they're based on hundreds hundreds of pages of shared intelligence from various law enforcement agencies.

And they do a pretty good job of sketching out how the Super Cartel operates.

It calls them partners in a sort of holding company for international cocaine trafficking.

And that holding company, it works on a few simple but powerful economic principles.

The most important thing is market power.

This new consortium, it's based out of Dubai, but it has a global reach that stretches across Europe, Africa and Latin America.

And by being bigger, the super cartel can buy cocaine in larger quantities at lower prices.

They can spread their risk.

The file says that they work to form joint ventures with Colombian cartels to quote control the trafficking of cocaine from South America into the ports of Rotterdam and Antwerp.

They share the same transport routes.

and they start to pool their cash.

The aim is to quote, maintain control of the supply channels because that gives them bigger market share in Europe and a better ability to set prices.

And the cartel starts to establish economic co-interests.

They're laundering their money together and they're investing it in countries around the world.

The fire also has these remarkably detailed examples of the logistical complexity of these operations.

They're not only using ports, They send drugs, money and guns through fleets of articulated lorries leaving the Netherlands to travel across Europe.

And there are these photos, sent between Imperiale and his crew, of huge shipments of cocaine sitting in a warehouse.

They're on industrial pallets.

In this case, it's being sent to Sydney, Australia, in a shipping container disguised as Italian natural stone.

On another occasion, Imperiale arranges for a truck filled with several million euros to be sent to a fellow super cartel member's son in the Netherlands.

So this is starting to look quite a lot like the way you'd structure a multinational trading company.

You've got equity partners, pooling their resources and spreading their risk.

And they use their scale to get cheaper prices and lower distribution costs.

And profit margins, they go up.

Business is booming.

And all of them are making more money than ever before.

But for Daniel Kinahan, quietly growing his business, it's not enough.

Because he wants his reputation to grow, not as a drug trafficker, but as a global sports tycoon.

And this next bit of the story, it shows just how fuzzy the lines have become between gangster, online influencer, and entrepreneur.

Today, Tyson Fury is one of the best-known boxers on the planet.

He's outspoken and funny, and recently, he was given the ultimate badge of fame.

Tyson!

His own reality TV show.

on Netflix, following him, his wife Paris, and their six children.

Before he met Kinahan, Fury had some major success.

In 2015, he defied the odds to beat Ukraine's Vladimir Klitschko in a match broadcast by Sky Sports.

I've put everything in the gym for this and I just can't believe it and I've got it.

So Fury's credit, it is genuinely one of the best wins that a British boxer has ever done.

It wasn't in England, it was a win on foreign soil and it was against a guy who hadn't been beaten for more than a decade.

But after that win, Tyson Fury's life just spiraled.

This is boxing journalist Alan Dawson.

He tested positive for the banned substance nandrolone and by his own admission he was using cocaine and drinking tequila in the morning.

By 2017, Tyson Fury's down and out.

He later talked about this period of his life on Joe Rogan's podcast.

I'd wake up and I think, why did I wake up this morning?

This is coming from a man who had everything, money, fame, glory, titles, a wife, a family, kids, everything.

But I felt as if I had nothing.

I felt there was an empty, gaping hole.

So Kinahan entered his life at this point.

When Daniel Kinahan was in Spain, he picked up promising young boxers, paying for the best trainers and the best equipment.

But that's not what Fury needs.

And it's kind of unclear what specifically Kinahan did for Fury, but for Ben Davison, who was Tyson Fury's coach at the time, it was simply a belief in him.

It's a theme I've observed in Kinahan where he tends to enter people's lives when they're at their lowest ebb and I kind of see that in quite a predatory way.

In 2017, Tyson Fury posts a selfie on Twitter.

He and Daniel Kinahan are sitting next to each other, both wearing colourful shirts.

They look relaxed, they're grinning, arms around each other's shoulders, giving the camera a thumbs up.

They look like best friends.

It's a classic story.

The fallen champion on the ropes, needing to relaunch their career.

Tyson Fury doesn't have any connection to crime, but just like that, one of the world's most famous boxers has a new advisor, Daniel Kinahan.

Fury is clearly one of the most talented, if not the most talented boxer of his generation, at least British boxer, you know, he's clearly like a huge figure in the sport.

But what does it do for Kinahan?

What does signing up a boxer like Tyson Fury do for this seemingly fairly small, you know, low-level

figure in boxing.

It completely legitimizes him in boxing.

He's in the ear of the number one heavyweight in boxing.

Yeah, that was really the beginning for Daniel Kinahan to become one of probably the top three most powerful figures in the entire sport.

Through Daniel's friendship with Tyson Fury, a whole new world of celebrity and fame is opening up.

So in 2017, he's at the top of his game.

He's rich and he's feared.

And he's about to get married.

There's a huge moment in anyone's life.

The venue for the big day is the Burj al-Arab, arguably the most luxurious hotel in the entire Middle East and easily one of the most expensive in the world.

It's all about as far from inner-city Dublin as you could be.

But his fiancée, the woman by his side as he builds his family's empire in the Middle East, she comes from much closer to home.

Daniel's bride to be was born close to where he grew up.

And for Nicola Talon, the Irish crime reporter we heard from last time, his choice of partner gives us an important insight into Daniel's character.

I see it as amazing that he has travelled the world.

He has mixed with people both in, you know, organised crime and at the highest end of boxing.

He has...

followed his father's footsteps first to the Costa del Salen, then to Dubai.

Daniel Kinahan had to come back to Dublin to find a wife.

And his brother's the same.

What does that tell us about them?

Well, about Daniel Kinahan, I just think that, and maybe you'd need a psychologist who could explain this sort of stuff to you, but, you know, has he got deep underlying insecurities there?

Has he lived

a pretense?

Has he always aspired to be his father?

And at the same time, he has those narcissistic tendencies.

You know, does your world get smaller the richer you get?

You know, maybe you do have to go back to the to the original circle to find somebody that you trust.

But I think it probably has more to do with his insecurities.

He's always had a craving for home.

And maybe that's why, while he's getting ready to enter a new phase of his life, Daniel just can't let go of old grudges.

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On the streets of North Inner City City Dublin, we had armed patrols where our emergency response unit were seen along with those members of the Garish Shicona that would normally walk the beat.

And they were there to protect the lives, primarily, of those who we knew to be targets of the Kinahan organized crime group.

So there was a huge element of fear within the community.

While Daniel Kinahan establishes himself in his new home, back in Dublin, Jon O'Driscoll O'Driscoll's just taken up a new role as the Assistant Commissioner in charge of serious organised crime.

And his first job is to try and contain the gang war that's broken out after the attempt on Daniel's life.

A year after the shooting at the Regency Hotel, the violence was still raging.

There's this grim contrast between the Kinahan's luxury life in Dubai and the brutality that they're orchestrating thousands of miles away in Ireland.

How is it even possible to be ordering murders in a European capital with impunity?

There's only one thing on John's mind, stopping the Kinahans.

Perhaps if they hadn't engaged in the murderous activity that emerged after the regency, they may have

escaped the level of focus that was placed on them.

While Daniel Kinahan is making decisions about his wedding, choosing the flowers, the wine list, the music, deciding on the menu, he's also planning something else.

Three months before Daniel's wedding is due to take place, an Estonian man in his late 50s lands in Dublin.

Unbelievably, this man, he's known as the butcher.

He's got a reputation as a ruthless professional, a man who, for the right amount of money, he'll get the job done.

So Daniel, in between picking out the final details for his wedding, he gets in touch.

But the Irish police are prepared.

They follow follow the butcher from the moment he lands in Dublin.

And soon it becomes clear to them, he's in Ireland working for the Kinnahans.

And within a couple of hours, he had been apprehended by the Gardashikana.

And on entering a particular premises, he was found to be in contact with people believed to be based in Dubai, where instructions in relation to a murder that was to be

undertaken were being discussed.

that person was convicted.

So the contract killing fails.

It's a blow, but Daniel doesn't have time to dwell.

One of the most important aspects to planning any wedding is the seating plan.

Awkward cousins need to be spaced out, doting aunts made to feel important.

And for Daniel's wedding, picking the right seating plan is going to be more delicate than usual, because among the guests scheduled to attend are some of the most powerful crime bosses on the planet.

Raffaele Imperiale is one of the names on the guest list.

Another is Ridu Antagi, the murderous Dutch crime lord.

And there's Richard Vega, El Rico, the Dutch Chilean drugs trafficker.

Each of them, then known to their police in their home countries, some are already on the run.

But Daniel, he succeeds in keeping the wedding quiet.

There's no pictures on social media.

Nicola Talon picks up some details from her sources.

I'm going

They're dressed in tails.

And there are flowers everywhere, vases and arches of them.

Bouquets hanging over every table.

There's also an outside space, a terrace that feels private, jutting out into the Persian Gulf.

In the pictures I've seen, the water gives this scene a feeling of peace and calm.

And I wonder if Daniel Kinahan was feeling calm that day as he juggled the competing demands of cousins from back home with some of the most wanted and dangerous criminal masterminds.

because he might have been too busy to notice that somebody there was paying particularly close attention to the details of the day.

One of the guests is an informant, and later they'll share their account of the wedding with Western law enforcement.

It's not long before the information reaches John O'Driscoll.

Do you remember when you learned about the wedding, Daniel Kinahan's wedding in Dubai?

And what did that make you feel when you learn about that?

To see Kinnehan's at that table and perhaps even being looked upon as performing some sort of leadership role, it illustrated beyond any doubt that no one law enforcement entity could achieve any realistic success on its own in tackling one of these criminal enterprises, let alone a scenario where they were cooperating together.

For John O'Driscoll, the message from the wedding is clear.

He knows that he and the Irish police, they can't tackle the kinnahans on their own.

They're going to have to work with partners in other law enforcement agencies.

And John realises something else.

Seizing drugs or convicting their associates, they're just short-term measures.

To really bring the Kinhans down, he's going to have to focus on something else.

Money is the motive for getting involved in crime.

And whatever tactics law enforcement use to tackle organized crime, until such time as you...

tackle effectively the motive involved, you're not going to achieve the dismantling of an organization.

John starts working on a plan.

It's going to take a few years for it to come to fruition.

But at the same time, elsewhere in Europe, police are close to cracking an important code.

A code that will take them one step closer to bringing down the super cartel and solving the murder of the electrician in Almaire.

So, in the Netherlands, the panics within organized crime groups started on that day.

That's next time on 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 Breen Turner.

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