Stephen Breen
and Owen Conlon
THE CARTEL
The shocking true story of the rise of the Kinahan crime cartel and its deadly feud with the Hutch gang
Before moving to Dublin in 2009 Stephen Breen worked in Northern Ireland – first for the Belfast Telegraph and then for seven years as the Sunday Life’s crime correspondent, during which time he was twice named as Sunday Journalist of the Year. He is currently crime editor of the Irish Sun and has made regular appearances on RTÉ One’s Prime Time to discuss crime issues.
Owen Conlon has been a journalist for over fifteen years and has covered crime, politics and international affairs. He started his career in national radio network INN before moving to Spain, where he worked as a freelance for several UK and Irish national dailies and RTÉ. He now works as an assistant news editor for the Irish Sun. As well as Spanish, he speaks Portuguese and French.
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First published 2017
Published with a new Chapter 19 in Penguin Books 2018
Copyright © Stephen Breen and Owen Conlon, 2017, 2018
The moral right of the authors has been asserted
ISBN: 978-1-844-88401-8
To all the innocent victims of gangland violence
cartel /kαː̍tεl/► noun an association of manufacturers or suppliers with the purpose of maintaining prices at a high level and restricting competition i.e. ‘the Colombian drug cartels’.
The 999 call might well have been dismissed as a prank, were it not for its panicked tone and the fact that the man on the line identified himself instantly. John Glynn, Manager of the Regency Hotel in Drumcondra, on the northside of Dublin city, told the officer at the other end of the line that members of An Garda Síochána’s Emergency Response Unit (ERU) were on his premises, and they were shooting people.
Patrol cars rushed to the hotel and came upon a scene of utter chaos. People were huddled outside the hotel in groups, still in shock. When uniformed cops went inside there was a strong smell of gunpowder in the lobby. A body lay flat on the floor against the reception desk, unmoving. The man’s head and shoulders were turned at an awkward angle and blood oozed on to the floor from beneath the left side of his torso. Across from him gardaí found another man clutching his stomach and a third holding his thigh, both grimacing in pain.
The confrontation that had taken place just minutes beforehand, on 5 February 2016, was unprecedented in Irish history. Six armed men had arrived at a pre-boxing match weigh-in being held in broad daylight, looking for people to kill. Identifying their targets, they had opened fire inside a packed venue.
Three of the gunmen, who carried AK47 assault rifles, were disguised as members of the Garda’s elite SWAT-like ERU, prompting John Glynn’s frantic call. Another man was dressed in drag, complete with make-up and a wig.
Ireland is a country which has dealt with large-scale terrorism in the past, but this invariably involved attacks on the security forces, particularly in Northern Ireland. It has also seen its fair share of gangland assassinations, but these were always carried out with as few witnesses around as possible. This was something else entirely.
One criminal gang, the Hutches, had launched a brazen military-style attack on a rival criminal group, the Kinahan cartel. The dead man, drug dealer David Byrne, was a senior figure within the latter outfit. One of the injured men, Sean McGovern, was a lower-ranking cartel member while the other, Aaron Bolger, was a hanger-on.
The real target, however, was Daniel Kinahan, the son of Christy Kinahan, and one of the leaders of the Kinahan drugs and arms cartel. When the gunmen entered the front door of the hotel, Daniel had been in the function room adjoining the lobby, watching the weigh-in take place.
As pandemonium broke out, the boxer and officials on stage and many of those watching from the floor ran for the fire exit immediately to the left of the raised area. Others, Daniel Kinahan amongst them, ran out a door directly behind it.
The heir apparent of the cartel was pushed outside by his bodyguard. They made their way up a staircase on to a flat roof and, jumping down, fled the scene on foot. The two men are believed by gardaí to have taken the first flight they could get, to reach safety in London.
No arrests were made by gardaí, the attackers having fled before the force’s arrival. The getaway vehicle, a Ford Transit van, was later found burnt out in a nearby housing estate.
There was a general air of disbelief in the city following the attack, with the Taoiseach making statements aimed at calming an unnerved public. But if the authorities had been left stunned by what had happened, those who had found themselves under attack were stupefied.
For more than six years, the Kinahan cartel had been the undisputed top dog of Ireland’s criminal world. It controlled the country’s drugs and arms traffic and very little happened without its say-so, particularly if it would affect the gang’s business interests.
The previous September, Gary Hutch, once a key member of the cartel, and an ally and personal friend of Daniel Kinahan, had been shot dead at his apartment in southern Spain.
Hutch had been accused of trying to kill his former boss, though he protested his innocence. That afternoon, Gary’s associates had come for their revenge against the man who had ordered his murder. They had failed.
As Daniel Kinahan, Liam Byrne, brother of the dead man and a senior gang figure, and other members of the cartel gathered their wits, their shock turned to fury.
There would be hell to pay.
‘When it came to the drugs importation business, he learned from his mistakes.’
Retired Assistant Garda Commissioner
Michael O’Sullivan
The young undercover officer posing as an electrician thought the man who had just opened the door of the apartment under surveillance in Fairview, north Dublin, was the target of the operation, but he could not be sure. The last photograph gardaí had of him dated back to 1979, an era when shaggy, long locks were all the rage. Seven years later, the man matched the description gardaí had been given, but he had shorter hair and seemed better groomed.
‘Sorry, can you check to see if your lights are working, please, we’ve had some problems?’ the cop asked him, remaining in character.
‘Wha’?’ replied the man in a strong Dublin accent, before quickly realizing he had a pretence of his own to maintain. Switching to an English drawl, he continued, ‘I think the lights are fine, mate. I will check and let you know.’
The target closed the door and went back into the apartment. Mission accomplished, the undercover officer backed off. The Garda surveillance team, including current Garda Commissioner, Noirín O’Sullivan, continued to watch as a known drug addict visited the flat and handed over money for a small package.
As detectives were now satisfied their target, Christy Kinahan, was staying there, they obtained a search warrant the following day and swooped on the apartment.
When they burst in, Christy was eating a sandwich and almost choked when he saw the gardaí. An Algerian man, who detectives later discovered was named Rabah Serier, was also sitting in the living room.
While some officers began questioning Serier, others checked the bedroom. On the right-hand side of the bed they found a holdall. Inside was IR£117,000 worth of heroin. There was also a weighing scales, glucose, a mirror and razor blades, along with stolen cheque books, cheque cards and IR£2,275 in cash, all in a bundle at the bottom of the wardrobe.
The anonymous information gardaí had been given was correct. That summer in 1986, the Christy Kinahan they used to know as a chancer and a fraudster had moved into the far more profitable world of drugs.
Christopher Kinahan was born in Ealing, in London, in 1957 into a decent family and has two sisters. While he was still a child, they returned home to Dublin and settled in Phibsboro, north Dublin, where his father worked as a dairy firm manager. His parents, Daniel and Mary, were respectable people and their house at 13 Charleville Road had also been the childhood home of Taoiseach John A. Costello, the man who would go on to declare Ireland a Republic in 1948.
Christy was cut from different cloth. Though intelligent and devoted to his chosen sport of judo, he was a troublemaker in school and was kicked out of St Declan’s College, in Cabra, on Dublin’s northside. He was accepted at O’Connell’s School on North Richmond Street, whose past pupils include James Joyce, Pat Kenny, actor Colm Meaney and his predecessor at 13 Charleville Road, John A. Costello. Once again, Christy would fall short of those who had gone before him.
Exempt from learning Irish due to his London upbringing, Christy failed his Leaving Certificate, finishing school with an E in maths, history and art. His only two passes came with Ds in English and – fittingly for a future international drug baron – geography.
After leaving school, Kinahan worked for a short period as a part-time taxi driver. He married his girlfriend, Jean Boylan, and the couple had two sons: Daniel, born on 25 June 1977, and Christopher Jr, born on 24 September 1980.
Christy soon abandoned his driving job and started concentrating all his efforts on crime. He focused on cheque fraud, distribution of stolen cheques, stealing cars and the odd burglary.
Christy’s first conviction came in 1979 at the age of twenty-two for attempted car theft. He faced more charges for burglary and receiving stolen property over the next two years, but these were later struck out in court.
By the early eighties, Kinahan had taken his first steps towards becoming a household name in Ireland – for all the wrong reasons. He was familiar to gardaí, but more as a swindler than a serious criminal. However, he continued to network in dodgy circles – in both the north and south inner city – including those of Gerry ‘the Monk’ Hutch.
In 1983, Gerry Hutch was regarded as an up-and-coming criminal from the north inner-city area of Dublin. Like Kinahan, his early criminal career started with involvement in the stolen cheque trade. Through this common enterprise, he was introduced to Christy Kinahan and over the years the pair would forge a close friendship and working relationship.
That same year, Christy was arrested for cheque fraud. He received a IR£200 fine for this offence and was bound over to keep the peace for a year.
Despite being up to his neck in scams, a year later Kinahan set up a firm offering a ‘sealed security card service’ with another man, though it appears the company never actually traded.
By the middle of the decade, Christy was still primarily involved in theft and con jobs, but he could also see the enormous profits being made in the heroin trade. At the time, the Dunne family controlled the drugs scene in the capital and their network of dealers were selling openly in Dublin’s inner-city flat complexes.
Widely regarded as the man who introduced heroin to Ireland, Larry Dunne was the country’s first drugs godfather. By swamping inner-city communities with the drug, Dunne, who once paid IR£100,000 in cash for a house, led a champagne lifestyle. He was driven around Dublin in a limo as heroin took its stranglehold on entire communities, leading to the deaths of hundreds of people over the years.
The money the Dunnes were making from their drugs empire was huge and they flaunted it openly, moving to expensive areas on Dublin’s southside, sending their children to private schools, taking expensive foreign holidays and eating at the city’s best restaurants. None of these ostentatious displays of wealth escaped Christy’s attention.
Christy left his wife, Jean, while his children were at a young age and began going out with a woman from Dublin’s York Street area, near the St Stephen’s Green shopping centre. His new partner knew some of those involved in the trade and Christy used her to gain himself an introduction. He approached local dealers in a bid to establish how they were operating, what contacts they were using and to offer his support in arranging shipments.
By the end of 1985 he was successful in gaining their trust and started dealing. Kinahan’s outsider status enabled him to keep a low profile compared to many other criminals who the gardaí knew were actively involved in drugs.
As an experienced fraudster, Kinahan also maintained a smoother veneer than other nouveaux-riches working-class gangsters, such as the Dunnes. Christy was always well dressed and, due to his involvement in the stolen cheque trade, had often posed as a businessman. Earning a reputation as one of the capital’s main fraudsters, he would later become known as the ‘Dapper Don’ because of his polished appearance and love of fine clothes.
Christy also operated from a small convenience store in Irishtown, in south Dublin. Although they couldn’t prove it at the time, by the start of 1986 gardaí believed he used it as a front to launder the proceeds of stolen cheques.
He was under regular Garda surveillance but they did not have enough evidence to move against him. Some of the surveillance operations could actually be carried out from the back of Irishtown Garda Station, which overlooked his store.
Kinahan would motor around the city in a white Hiace van, frequently trailed by an undercover garda on a motorbike, posing as a courier. Around two months before gardaí swooped on the Fairview apartment, Christy had come to their attention as someone who might be involved in the drugs trade. They didn’t think he was dealing from the van, but they wanted to keep tabs on his movements.
On one occasion, the cop followed Christy to the North Circular Road. When Kinahan pulled up, the garda unhooked the motorbike’s chain and pretended to work on it, as he subtly kept his mark under observation. As he knelt on the road, the garda also watched two men go into a nearby house. The pair looked suspicious and he watched as, sometime later, they came out the back door of the property carrying a fireplace, which they had clearly just stolen. Unable to blow his own cover, the garda discreetly informed his colleagues of the break-in and a squad car was sent to intercept the two scavengers. Meanwhile, the sporadic surveillance continued.
Timing was also on Christy’s side as he sought to establish himself on the drugs scene. In May 1985, Larry Dunne was jailed for fourteen years after gardaí found IR£60,000 worth of heroin, cocaine and hash at his home. It was an ironic end for a man who boasted he would never be caught due to his motto: ‘Larry doesn’t carry.’ Loud cheers came from the public gallery in 1985 as his sentence was announced. As he was being led away, Dunne reportedly told gardaí, ‘If you think we’re bad, wait ’til you see what’s coming after us.’ They would prove to be prophetic words. (Currently living in a modest house in south Dublin, the former heroin kingpin has consistently refused to comment on the devastating effect of drugs on Irish society, and on his family’s role in bringing them into Ireland.)
Christy’s next move was to rent a luxury apartment from a local couple at Crescent House, in Fairview, close to the upmarket area of Clontarf, in north Dublin. Complete with his fake English accent, he posed as a commercial traveller from London who made regular trips to Dublin.
‘He was such a nice man,’ explained a friend of the flat’s landlord. ‘He was very clean, courteous and the place was immaculate. He claimed he was a businessman, and there wasn’t a hint of any trouble when he was staying there.’
On the surface, Christy was the perfect tenant – he was plausible, intelligent, articulate and drove a red sports car. In fact the apartment was being used as a safe house. The intention was to store the drugs there before bringing them to other distribution homes and locations across the city. Only a small number of people would have known the drugs had been stored there. The apartment was a world away from the flat complexes of the inner city and the kinds of places where heroin was usually stored.
The location was so unlikely that when gardaí received a tip-off about what was going on at the apartment, they initially had trouble believing it. Kinahan had barely hit their radar for drug dealing. The success of the bust on 14 September 1986 would change all that.
Once in custody, Christy held up his hands and admitted responsibility. Dropping his phoney English Home Counties twang, Christy said, ‘I’m taking full responsibility for everything found – the gear, the cheques, everything.’ However, he bizarrely denied having supplied the junkie who had just left the apartment, despite the fact detectives had watched Christy carry out the deal.
He admitted he had been dealing for about three months before the raid and, turning to the ‘electrician’ who had arrested him, said, ‘I was told to watch out for you.’
Christy was held on remand after his arrest, and by the time his trial started in March 1987 Kinahan had changed his tune. The court heard he had rented the apartment, but was not living there. He claimed he had agreed to let Rabah Serier live there, but knew nothing about the drugs or Serier’s involvement with them.
The middle-class suburb they were operating from was the ideal cover for their activities. It was notable that the heroin was not even hidden and was quite openly kept in a bag on the floor. The pair were cutting up and diluting the drug before wholesaling it to street dealers for between IR£300 and IR£500 a time.
During the trial, no explanation was offered for how Kinahan and Serier knew each other, but evidence was given that they had opened a joint bank account five weeks earlier, into which they had lodged IR£5,352. Serier’s lawyer later suggested that this money was for the opening of a clothing business.
Caught red-handed, Kinahan pleaded guilty and settled on the wheeze that he himself was a heroin addict who was trying to turn his life around, and that he intended to enter a drug rehabilitation programme. Gardaí believed this to be a blatant lie.
Christy also stated that he was trying to better himself and was learning Arabic and French. Gardaí agreed, but were certain the Linguaphone tapes found at the apartment, which Christy was using to learn the languages, were part of a master plan aimed at furthering his drug-trafficking activities. Learning the languages would give him the tools to deal directly with organized criminal gangs all over Europe. Some of the biggest suppliers were in countries such as Morocco, and Kinahan’s new skill would enable him to avoid the language barrier when it came to negotiating prices for shipments of drugs.
At Christy’s sentencing hearing, his barrister said he had taken several courses while on remand and was continuing his French language studies.
Gardaí believed Kinahan’s attempts to play the victim card, portraying himself as a heroin addict, were his way of obtaining a lesser sentence from the courts. The ploy partially worked, as the trial judge declared that ‘were it not for the circumstances’, he would have jailed Christy for ten years. Instead, he got six.
However, the Dapper Don’s efforts to hold on to the IR£2,275 in cash found at the apartment did not go as well. Opposing a subsequent application for its forfeiture, Kinahan said he had made the money from selling cars and had also been getting an enterprise grant from the State of IR£50 a week. The judge ignored his claims.
His co-defendant, the Algerian Rabah Serier, was something of a mystery man. Interpol had no record of him and gardaí had never come across him before either. He had married an Irish woman six years previously and the court heard the union was now in ‘a spot of bother’.
One of Serier’s brothers was a high-ranking Algerian police officer and his family had been genuinely shocked when he was arrested for drugs offences. After his arrest, another brother had flown to Ireland offering IR£10,000 in an attempt to have him bailed, but this was refused by the court.
At the trial Serier went for the religious angle. He had begun a hunger strike in jail, claiming he was a strict Muslim who was not being allowed to pray or access halal food behind bars. He too pleaded guilty and turned up for sentencing looking pale and drawn in a wheelchair. The tactic also succeeded to a degree, as Serier received a four-and-a-half-year jail term.
Michael O’Sullivan, the undercover ‘electrician’ who arrested Kinahan, became an Assistant Commissioner. He believes the relatively light sentences were a missed opportunity to end Kinahan’s criminal career early:
Like many first business enterprises, there are always risks involved. But in heroin, the risks were huge. Anyone caught with the drug could face a lengthy prison sentence, thereby disrupting their activities and ability to accumulate profit. Kinahan knew nothing about heroin and, contrary to what many people believe, he wasn’t using it. He wasn’t a street criminal like many of the dealers at the time. The only people who knew about heroin at that time were the dealers and the users.
The only reason Christy Kinahan got involved in this trade is because he was a mercenary. He was an opportunist who saw there was money to be made. Well-known criminals at that time like the Dunne family didn’t matter to him. Like any visionary businessman, he was a forward thinker and a planner. The only people who knew he was getting involved in heroin in 1986 were those who were close to him.
His first shipment was ultimately a disaster for Kinahan but because there was an Algerian national with him at the time it showed that he had already been building his international connections. He would also come to court with his books and read. Even then, he was already thinking of the future. But can you imagine if he had received twenty years? He probably wouldn’t have been in business today. Heroin was absolutely devastating communities in Ireland at the time and a twenty-year sentence would have been deemed appropriate. If he had received twenty years, then he would have been coming out to a completely different society and one where he would have had no power.
Christy kept himself occupied during his six years in jail, using the time to study, but the way he was caught ate away at him. He was a man who bore grudges, both against those he blamed for his arrest and the cops who carried it out.
Eleven years after the bust at the Fairview apartment, then Detective Garda O’Sullivan was out for a run near his Dublin home when he noticed a white Ford Fiesta acting suspiciously. Manoeuvring himself so he could see the driver, he made out Kinahan’s features behind the wheel. Detective O’Sullivan remained calm and he later told his colleagues what had happened. It was a forerunner of the sort of intimidation which Kinahan would try to impose on a much grander scale – particularly towards the gang member he had decided was responsible for his arrest.
Raymond Salinger had lived in London before and he hadn’t particularly liked it. In fact, his first stay in the British capital in 1984 had ended abruptly after two months. The young Dubliner had been unable to find any work and, spending his days drinking and smoking cannabis, he could no longer stand the homesickness. So when Raymond with his wife, Paula, and their young daughter boarded a ferry bound for the UK again in the summer of 1987, it was not from choice. Salinger, then twenty-five years old, was fleeing for his life.
An occasional drug user and former drug dealer, Salinger was born into a family of eight brothers and four sisters on Kevin Street, in Dublin’s south inner city, on 17 November 1962.
In his early teenage years, Salinger didn’t have much interest in school and soon found himself in trouble with his parents. Easily influenced, he was engaging in antisocial behaviour, drinking and missing school.
Local gardaí soon noted him hanging around with minor criminals and he was stopped several times driving without insurance. When heroin hit Dublin in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it also hit Salinger too. Like many of his friends, he soon found himself experimenting with the drug. Once hooked, he turned to crime to feed his habit.
Raymond first came to the attention of gardaí as a seventeen-year-old. A file later sent to the DPP noted that he was considered to be ‘associating with small-time criminals’. He started breaking into homes and stealing handbags. Then his dad, Martin, died.
As one former friend put it, ‘With his father gone he had no one to keep him on the straight and narrow. His life became a mess after that, and his involvement in drugs and crime simply escalated.’
As the 1980s progressed, Raymond Salinger was regarded by gardaí as ‘being involved in drugs’. But, on the numerous occasions he was stopped and searched, officers only recovered small amounts of cannabis and heroin. Salinger claimed they were for his own use, and he had no convictions for drugs.
But he would soon have far bigger concerns than searches by the gardaí. Having been identified by his neighbours as someone who was peddling cannabis to teenagers in the south inner city, it was only a matter of time before Salinger came to the attention of the members of the Concerned Parents Against Drugs (CPAD), the republican-dominated vigilante group.
The State was slow to respond to the negative impact of the drugs flooding working-class areas of Dublin. Many residents believed the gardaí weren’t doing enough to arrest the drug dealers, and that’s when the community responded. CPAD saw an opportunity to fill the vacuum, regularly marching on the homes of suspected dealers, demanding they leave the area immediately.
But there were concerns the response had been hijacked by republican paramilitaries. Very often, the protests descended into chaos, with fist fights between the dealers and the vigilantes. At the beginning of 1984, the CPAD group in the Crumlin and Kevin Street areas had compiled a list of targets. On it was the name of 21-year-old Raymond Salinger.
At first, Salinger and his friends had continued to sell small bags of heroin to users across the south inner city. But after his family were threatened by a senior republican figure in 1984, Salinger fled to London, hoping to create a new life for himself working on the city’s building sites. Work was hard to come by, however, and Salinger lasted just two months before returning to Dublin.
The threat against him was still very much alive when he got back and Salinger knew that if he was to make himself less of a target, he would no longer be able to peddle drugs directly and would have to advance up the chain.
Using his connections, he was introduced to Christy Kinahan, who was five years his senior. It was at the same time that Christy was making his own moves in Dublin’s underworld, graduating from fraud into drugs. Throughout 1985, gardaí believed Kinahan and a tight-knit group of associates were distributing cannabis across the south inner city to a regular customer base. Heroin, however, was a far more profitable drug and Salinger had experience in the trade.
Salinger was accepted into Kinahan’s crew and became a trusted member. But when Christy was caught red-handed with drugs at his Fairview apartment in 1986, following the Garda surveillance operation, he decided he had been double-crossed by a member of his own gang.
Working through a number of suspects, Christy identified the people in his inner circle who had knowledge of his shipment and, more importantly, knew the location of his flat. Eventually, he settled on his young friend and criminal associate Raymond Salinger.
Garda officers at the time had intelligence which suggested that ‘… Christopher Kinahan was convinced Salinger had given the gardaí information, which resulted in his arrest and conviction.’
Ostracized from Kinahan’s inner circle, Salinger knew he was being blamed for what had happened. Despite pleading his innocence to some of Christy’s closest associates, and despite there being no evidence to prove the young drug dealer was an informer, Salinger knew his new boss’s mind was already made up.
Kinahan was in jail, but Salinger wasn’t taking any chances. He escaped to the UK with his wife and daughter.
Arriving in London, he and his family were collected by the same friends he’d moved in with when he’d fled Dublin in 1984, that time under threat from the community activists. The exiled criminal had been diagnosed with asthma because of his smoking habit of forty cigarettes a day, but he continued to use cannabis, smoke heroin and drink heavily.
One friend said:
He was in London with a young family and he wasn’t a single man any more. He was determined to do his best for his wife and daughter and would stay off the drugs any time he was in regular employment on the building sites around London but also in other UK cities. They found it hard adapting to life in London at the start but soon found their feet.
Raymond Salinger was not going back to Dublin any time soon – but he would discover that Christy Kinahan had a long memory.
Upon his release in 1992, Christy soon went back to his old ways. If you watch that year’s episode of the popular RTÉ show Reeling in the Years, it features the usual range of nostalgic highlights to remind viewers how much has changed in this country and how much has stayed the same. Amid the footage of Annie Murphy’s revelation of her affair with Bishop Casey, the horrific Yugoslav civil war and Michael Carruth’s gold medal win in Barcelona, is an interview with Dr Eamon Keenan. He discusses how widespread rave culture, and the accompanying use of the drug Ecstasy, had become.
The popularity of Ecstasy meant that when Christy Kinahan walked out of jail in March of that year, a whole new world of opportunities had opened up for him. Drug use was no longer confined to heroin in poor working-class areas or cocaine in upper-class ones. Ecstasy was a drug that had reached all strata of Irish society, including small towns across the country where the worst the local drugs squad had previously had to deal with was a little cannabis. ‘E’ was being taken by adults and teenagers, from sinkhole estates to affluent suburbs. And even better from a drug trafficker’s point of view, the new dance drugs could be synthesized far closer to the Irish market, eliminating the need for multi-stop transportation from abroad and the perils of dealing with rival gangs.
It was a market Christy was keen to exploit. To his old staples of heroin, cocaine and cannabis, he quickly added the new product and soon became involved in the Ecstasy trade through his contacts in Europe.
Christy also continued to network with other Dublin criminals. In June 1993, IR£16,000 worth of travellers’ cheques were taken in a raid by armed robber Thomas ‘Bomber’ Clarke on the First National Building Society in Drumcondra, in Dublin. Once more, the police had been tipped off about Christy’s possible involvement and mounted a surveillance operation.
A week after the raid, gardaí staked out a grotto near St James’s Hospital, Dublin, and watched while Kinahan met with a man on a bicycle and handed him a bag, before they went their separate ways. Detectives pulled over the cyclist and found the travellers’ cheques inside the holdall.
Kinahan was arrested and charged with possession of stolen cheques, and he was facing some serious jail time once more. He received bail, despite Garda objections, and, as he did not fancy heading back to Mountjoy Prison, he skipped to Holland. There, he returned to work as a drugs wholesaler, only this time on a bigger scale. The Dapper Don would also add a new interest to his CV – weapons.
Not long after this, Christy was caught in the Netherlands with a haul of Ecstasy, cocaine and weapons and was jailed for four years. He served just one year at Norgerhaven jail, in northern Holland. Christy again tried to make the most of the situation, hooking up behind bars with established Dutch criminals such as arms dealer Johannes ‘Joopie’ Altepost.
Following his release from prison, Kinahan continued his relationship with Altepost, who had extensive gun-running contacts in eastern Europe. Altepost was also a key target for law enforcement agencies across Europe.
Christy also established a relationship with a crooked Dutch lawyer who would prove very useful in building up a property portfolio for him in Belgium some years later.
Upon his release Kinahan was soon on the move again, this time to the upmarket town of Tamworth, outside Birmingham, in the UK. There, he busied himself making more criminal contacts.
Two of them were brothers, serious criminals from outside Birmingham. Others included Maurice Sines and James Crickmore, who earned a record fourteen-year ban from horse racing after they were found to be involved in a massive race-fixing scam.
For the sake of appearances, Christy was listed as the director of a tanning salon, along with the Dutch woman he had married in Surrey following the end of his marriage to Jean Boylan. His new wife would also later be named as the company secretary of a mortgage brokerage run by a British-Indian man who would go on to become a significant figure within the cartel.
Kinahan gradually solidified his network of contacts in Dublin’s criminal underworld, including those associated with his old friend Gerry ‘the Monk’ Hutch.
In the intervening years while Kinahan had focused on the drugs trade, Hutch’s speciality had become armed robberies. Hutch, who also had close links to the Provisional IRA, was regarded as the mastermind behind a IR£1.7 million heist from a Securicor cash-in-transit van in Fairview, north Dublin, on 26 January 1987. The veteran criminal, who claimed to have made his money through the property trade, was also suspected of orchestrating the theft of IR£3 million from the Brinks Allied depot in Clonshaugh, north Dublin, in 1995. Although not directly involved in the drugs trade, gardaí believed he turned a blind eye to Christy’s operation.
Kinahan also built up a powerful list of contacts across Europe, using them to arrange his shipments into Ireland. He used false passports to move over and back to Dublin from the Continent, to strike deals and drum up new customers.
Maintaining a low profile in his hideouts in Holland, Kinahan put his business plan into action. He started to put a team of trusted associates in place, including his young son Daniel, then in his late teens. Daniel was looking to his dad for inspiration and was also building up his own network.
The gang brought shipments of drugs and high-powered weapons into Ireland. Companies were established and premises sourced and rented in order to lend legitimacy. A few trial runs of genuine products would take place, to further beef up appearances, before the real merchandise would begin to flow through the secure system. Many of the warehouses would be used as bases to store his product. As his business plan took shape, Kinahan also established links with truck drivers and transport companies he could use to deliver his goods.
Following the murder of journalist Veronica Guerin on 26 June 1996, however, the State declared war on organized crime. The brazen murder of a young mother who had dared to question where drug traffickers, such as John Gilligan, were getting their money from caused genuine public outrage throughout the country.
Gilligan, then Ireland’s top drug baron and one of its most notorious criminals, was making no attempt to hide his wealth, having bought an equestrian centre in Jessbrook, County Kildare with his illicit millions.fn1 The pressure was on the Government to respond. The establishment of the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) was their answer, aimed at hitting criminals where it hurt – in their pockets. The CAB, which was also adopted by other European countries, received powers to seize assets and to freeze the bank accounts of criminals who were benefiting from the proceeds of crime. Its staff are not just gardaí, they are tax officials, social welfare officers, customs officers, forensic accountants and other financial analysts. Christy’s two associates from Birmingham would go on to become key targets of Britain’s Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA), the UK’s answer to Ireland’s CAB.
Key members of the gang led by drugs kingpin John Gilligan went to ground amid the huge Garda crackdown.
The same could not be said of Christy Kinahan and his gang throughout 1996. Over the following months, the newly formed Garda National Drug Unit (GNDU) would receive intelligence that many of the drugs now coming into Ireland belonged to Christy Kinahan.
What they had come to call the Kinahan Organized Crime Group (KOCG) was officially open for business.