The Bonnington Hotel is a grand, if slightly scruffy, four-star establishment in the Drumcondra suburb of north Dublin which has just finished laying on ‘a festive season like no other’.
Patrons enjoyed three-course seasonal dinners costing £36, parties featuring George Michael and Abba tribute acts and a New Year’s Eve gala dinner in its ‘newly refurbished’ Broomfield Suite.
Yet as staff mopped the marble floors and packed away faux-crystal champagne flutes, there was only one special occasion on their minds. And no one was talking about it.
February 5 will mark the tenth anniversary of an infamous gangland murder which took place in the ballroom. It was carried out by a group of masked men, disguised as police officers, who ran through the front door of the building, which was then named the Regency Hotel, carrying AK-47 assault rifles.
They promptly opened fire on members of a rival gang who had been attending the weigh-in for a boxing event named Clash of the Clans. In the ensuing carnage, which unfolded in daylight, with massed ranks of cameramen watching, three people were shot. One bled to death next to the reception desk.
The months that followed saw Dublin become a virtual war-zone, with at least 13 people murdered in retaliatory attacks. There was much soul-searching, as politicians, priests and community leaders wondered how organised criminals could behave with such astonishing impunity.
And the man who had been the main target of the February 5 shootout?
He was long gone. Having escaped via an emergency exit, he fled to Dubai, where he’s been ever since.
Daniel Kinahan runs Ireland’s version of the mafia, once controlling a third of Europe’s cocaine
Kinahan with boxer Tyson Fury. The Irishman is nicknamed ‘Chess’ because of his cunning
The man’s name is Daniel Kinahan. His job: running the Kinahan Organised Crime Group, Ireland’s equivalent of the Italian Mafia.
An intense, dark-haired 48-year-old, Kinahan is a key player in what police call the ‘Super Cartel’, which was at one point believed to control a third of Europe’s cocaine trade. His wealth was recently estimated by An Garda Siochána, the Irish police service, at £740million.
American law enforcement, which sanctioned him in 2022 and put a $5million bounty on his head, says he’s ‘involved in narco-trafficking throughout Europe’. The crime drama Kin, on Netflix, is said to be loosely based on his family’s criminal enterprise.
Nicknamed ‘Chess’ because of his strategic cunning, Kinahan works with his father Christy, 68, a softly spoken and well-dressed figure known as ‘the Dapper Don’, and brother Christy Jnr, 45.
While their empire was made in Dublin, all three have, since the 2016 attack, run their lives and business affairs almost entirely from Dubai.
There, they enjoy access to tens of millions of pounds’ worth of luxury apartments and have been able to take advantage of relaxed money-laundering laws. For their wives and kids there is year-round sunshine and an endless supply of fashion boutiques and high-end car showrooms in which to spend (and flaunt) their ill-gotten gains.
The Gulf is also where they make memories. In 2017, Daniel married fellow Dubliner Caoimhe Robinson in an excruciatingly ostentatious bash at the Gulf city’s seven-star Burj Al Arab hotel. It saw the happy couple sitting on gilded thrones beneath a giant chandelier, surrounded by a host of international drug-smuggling kingpins, several of whom are now in jail, plus their friend Tyson Fury, the champion boxer.
Christy Snr has become a regular at Dubai’s 19 Michelin-starred restaurants, chronicling his culinary adventures via Google reviews. ‘I had the açai bowl, followed by eggs with almond bread and green salad,’ reads one of his posts. ‘My meal was well-presented and tasty. I give this establishment five stars.’
Since 2016, the gang have run their lives and business affairs almost entirely from Dubai
It has been a golden decade. But all good things must come to an end, and as we enter 2026 there are signs the family’s cushy existence may be about to implode.
For, after years of offering sanctuary to some of the world’s most notorious crooks, and happily taking their dirty money, Dubai’s ruling class appears to be slowly, but surely, starting to clean up their city’s reputation.
They have, in recent years, signed extradition treaties, including one with Ireland.
It took effect in May last year, and immediately saw a key Kinahan foot soldier, Sean McGovern, arrested in his luxury apartment and flown back to Dublin. McGovern, 39, went to Dubai after being wounded in the 2016 shootout at the hotel.
Now behind bars in Ireland, he is awaiting trial for the murder of rival gang member Noel ‘Duck Egg’ Kirwan in its aftermath.
In October, there was further bad news for the Kinahans. An unnamed member of the wider family was refused entry to the Emirates at the request of its authorities, after trying to board a flight in the UK.
Then, just before Christmas, the Emiratis, who have been extremely reluctant to extradite residents, suddenly announced that an alleged people-trafficking kingpin, Eritrean national Kidane Habtemariam, was being sent to the Netherlands.
Two other wanted men were also returned to Belgium. And four British men thought to be involved in organised crime were arrested and then released.
So from Daniel Kinahan’s point of view, this sets a precedent. The moves have come amid the heated lobbying of Dubai’s police and justice chiefs by their Irish counterparts.
Central to the whole thing is the Garda’s new ‘liaison officer’ to the Emirates. A high-flying senior detective, I can reveal that he was quietly brought in during the autumn, replacing a former small-town cop who had been based in Abu Dhabi since 2022. This new arrival arranged for several senior colleagues to fly to the Middle East to discuss, among other things, extraditions.
And Detective Chief Superintendent Seamus Boland, the head of the Garda’s Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau, talked up those meetings in an interview this week. ‘Work is still ongoing,’ he told RTE, Ireland’s national broadcaster. ‘It’s still ongoing at a very, very high level.
‘I can confirm that only in recent weeks, some of my staff have visited the UAE in relation to progressing our investigations and matters. And we have developed a very good and very positive relationship with our counterparts in the United Arab Emirates.’
Efforts to secure Kinahan’s return are, Det Boland said, gaining momentum due to the ten-year anniversary of the February 5 attack. ‘I’m very conscious of it,’ he said. ‘The important thing for us was that we would pursue the decision makers, the people who were controlling the violence, who were controlling the people who were willing to carry out that violence, and we’d pursue them until we bring them to justice.’ There are, it should be stressed, hurdles to overcome to bring this drug boss to justice.
For one thing, Irish prosecutors would need to charge Daniel Kinahan with a crime. To that end, the Garda passed two bundles of papers to the country’s DPP 18 months ago. One accuses him of directing the activities of a criminal organisation. The other claims he was responsible for the 2016 murder of Eddie Hutch, the first man to be killed in revenge after the hotel shooting.
Yet prosecutors have been sitting on them ever since. Cynics wonder if there is sufficient evidence to secure a conviction.
However, 2026 will open a fresh chapter in a compelling, if blood-soaked crime story which began 40 years ago in the Oliver Bond flats, a grim housing estate near the Guinness factory in central Dublin where Christy Snr began peddling heroin in the 1980s. Christy’s career took off when the city’s main importer Larry Dunne was jailed. But there were setbacks: he spent roughly half of the ensuing 15 years in prison, in Ireland and Amsterdam, on drug and weapons charges.
It wasn’t until his two sons joined the business, in the early 2000s, that they began to make serious loot, via the expanding cocaine market.
Key to their success was the division of labour. Christy Jnr was a quiet and somewhat cerebral figure, who managed the family’s money-laundering enterprises. Christy Snr had import and export contacts required to successfully ship the product to market. Daniel was the ‘enforcer’.
A stocky man, with a reputation for violence, he was described in a recent New Yorker profile as having a vocal tic in which he regularly seems to be seized by a phlegmy cough. ‘It’s like he’s trying to get the murders out,’ an acquaintance told the magazine. By the mid-2000s, the Kinahans had moved their centre of operations to the Costa del Sol, where they built close ties to international partners, including Colombian cartels whose traditional export routes to the US were being taken over by Mexicans.
Cocaine is an astonishingly profitable commodity. A kilo of the stuff, which can be purchased for as little as £2,000 in Latin America, will retail for £150,000 once it has been imported to Europe and ‘cut’ or diluted with other substances. And big traffickers, as the Kinahans soon became, ship it by the tonne.
The Cartel, a 2017 biography of the family, portrays Daniel as an unusually detail-orientated gangland boss who, in addition to purchasing properties and setting up businesses to launder cash, would pay for his foot soldiers to take training courses in firearms-handling, martial arts, counter-surveillance techniques and first aid. Long before others had cottoned on to the dangers of electronic communications, he would insist that gang members communicated only on encrypted phones (using similar brands to ones provided to the Royal Family).
By 2010, Daniel was on Europol’s list of the Top Ten drugs and arms suppliers in Europe, alongside Italy’s Cosa Nostra. But as his notoriety grew, so did police interest, and later that year 34 members of the gang, including all three Kinahans, were arrested in a series of dawn raids, called Operation Shovel.
Photographs of Christy Snr being handcuffed in his boxer shorts were hailed by Spain’s interior minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba, who crowed that he was part of a ‘well-known mafia family in the UK’. Meanwhile, 180 bank accounts associated with the Kinahans were frozen and dozens of properties on the Costa del Sol, among other assets, seized.
The gang’s activities temporarily ceased. Such was their influence on Ireland’s drug trade that, within weeks, supplies of heroin in Dublin had almost dried up.
What Operation Shovel failed to achieve, however, was to turn up enough evidence to support prosecutions. Although Christy Snr was eventually sentenced to two years in jail in Belgium for financial offences (he’d failed to demonstrate legitimate income for the purchase of a local casino), Daniel and his brother were released without charge.
They returned to the fray, trying to find out who tipped off the Spanish authorities.
Suspicion soon fell on the Hutch family, fellow Dubliners who had for years been allies. In particular, they suspected that one Gary Hutch, nephew of the patriarch Gerry ‘the Monk’ Hutch, was (to quote a piece of graffiti that popped up in Dublin) a ‘rat’.
In August 2014, Gary was suspected of trying to kill Daniel in a botched hit that saw a champion boxer named Jamie Moore shot in the leg outside a villa in Estepona, on the Costa del Sol. The following October, the Kinahans struck back: an assassin shot and killed Gary outside an apartment complex in the same holiday resort.
Four months later came the 2016 hotel shooting. As a spiral of retaliation kicked off, the Kinahans decided to build a new life in the safety of Dubai, where US authorities say they rented an apartment on the Palm Jumeirah artificial island.
Daniel would also become a leading player in boxing, pumping large amounts of cash into the sport and managing fighters.
This brought publicity. In 2021, the British former world champion Amir Khan tweeted: ‘I have huge respect for what he’s doing for boxing. We need people like Dan to keep the sport alive.’
Around the same time, Tyson Fury released a social media video thanking Kinahan for helping negotiate a business deal.
According to the recent New Yorker profile, those public pronouncements marked a rare misstep since they persuaded American authorities to start taking an interest in the Kinahans.
Chris Urben, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent, told the New Yorker: ‘It was stunning, it was unbelievable. Here you have Tyson Fury and he’s saying, “I’m with Dan Kinahan, and Dan is a good guy.” I remember having the conversation, “This cannot happen. This has got to stop.”‘
Sanctions were duly imposed against the Kinahans in 2022. Yet although the UAE claimed to have frozen all ‘relevant assets’, it soon transpired that tens of millions of pounds worth of the family’s financial interests, including local properties, were actually held by Daniel’s wife Caoimhe.
Despite having lifelong romantic links to organised criminals, Caoimhe is not suspected of direct criminality, so went unnamed in the US indictment. Daniel Kinahan will, however, have far less control over things if the UAE decides to return him to Dublin.
To that end, he may move to less vulnerable locations where his family have business interests. Potential destinations include Macau, China, Zimbabwe, Russia, or even Iran (Kinahan associates are believed to have worked with Hezbollah in the past).
Some wonder why he’s not vanished already. But Daniel and Caoimhe (with whom he has two children) are raising a young family, and leaving Dubai to go underground would be hard for them.
So Europe’s most notorious drug kingpin may soon face a stark choice: lose his liberty, or lose the sun-kissed life he enjoys with his family.
It means 2026 could finally be the year the gangster nicknamed ‘Chess’ faces checkmate.
