Sun sets on Middle East’s Costa del Crime

Dubai was the perfect command post for the Kinahan crime family.

For 10 years, Christy Kinahan Sr, “The Dapper Don”, and his two sons, Daniel and Christy Jr, ran their £1bn cocaine empire from lavish flats on Palm Jumeirah, a man-made 1,380-acre archipelago built in the shape of a palm tree.

A network of corrupt officials allowed the cartel to wash dirty money with impunity through the city’s frenetic real estate market.

Despite a $5m (£3.8m) reward for his arrest offered by US authorities in 2022, Daniel Kinahan, the clan’s de facto leader, freely mingled with Europe’s most powerful drug lords at boxing tournaments and in Michelin-starred restaurants.

But on Oct 10 2024, things changed.

Sean McGovern, Daniel Kinahan’s closest confidant and family consigliere, was arrested by Dubai Police.

Earlier this month, Daniel Kinahan himself was arrested, and is awaiting extradition to Ireland, where he faces organised crime-related offences. He is being detained in Al Awir Central Prison, nicknamed Dubai’s Alcatraz by former inmates.

Police and security sources revealed that the decision by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to tackle Dubai’s “Costa del Crime” only came about in the past two years because the reputational embarrassment was so acute that they could no longer strike trade deals with other countries.

The enclave of gangsters became an issue of “national interest” for the UAE, according to a former high-ranking British diplomat.

Senior figures in the Abu Dhabi government held frequent meetings about the “reputational hits” they were suffering on the world stage.

“If you were someone [a trade official or diplomat] and went to somewhere like Albania or Ireland, it wasn’t great because all they wanted to talk about was that their worst criminals were going to bars in your city,” the former diplomat said.

“It’s a little bit more than just getting over a few bad headlines. The UAE can get over a few bad headlines; it was becoming a significant bilateral irritant.

“It had become an issue of national interest to change their approach. They were finding it hard to do business in lots of places.”

The diplomat added: “If you were an organised crime boss or a rich, successful criminal of some kind, until 2024, Dubai was the best place you could go to because they weren’t arresting people, unless there was a political motive to it.”

Analysts also pointed to the reputational fallout of the UAE being added to the “grey list” of the Financial Action Task Force, a global anti-money laundering watchdog, in 2022.

The grey list is a group of countries that have been judged as not doing enough to combat money laundering and terrorist financing.

It took two years before investigators removed the UAE from the list.

Gangsters’ paradise

Dubai’s plethora of designer shops, lavish hotels, its status as a hub for gold trading and low cost of living had turned the emirate into a playground for gangsters.

Criminals flaunted their lifestyles on social media, posing in front of supercars and skyline penthouses.

The emirate’s ancestral “Hawala” banking system meant vast volumes of cash could be transferred without a trace.

Authorities asked no questions about where the Kinahans’ funds came from.

The only proviso was that they kept their transatlantic drug and arms trafficking operations outside the UAE.

The city was especially attractive for Balkan crime leaders.

An estimated two-thirds of Albania’s drug traffickers are believed to have fled to Dubai over the past decade, according to the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime.

Daniel Kinahan’s guest list for his wedding in 2017 at the “seven-star” Jumeirah Burj Al Arab hotel was almost a who’s who of Interpol’s most wanted.

The group included Edin Gačanin, a Bosnian drug lord known as “Europe’s Escobar”, Raffaele Imperiale, a high-ranking member of Italy’s Camorra linked to stolen Van Gogh paintings; Faissal Taghi, the son of a dual Dutch-Moroccan murderer; and Alejandro Salgado Vega, Spain’s biggest cocaine trafficker.

An undercover informant who infiltrated and recorded the wedding on behalf of the US Drug Enforcement Administration confirmed law enforcement’s suspicions that the Kinahans and the group had banded together to form a “super cartel”.

Living the life of Riley

Police estimated that together the group controlled a third of all of Europe’s annual £14.8bn cocaine supply from South America.

By 2026, all the kingpins had been either extradited from the UAE or arrested.

The turning point was the arrest of McGovern, who was the subject of an Interpol Red Notice, on Oct 10 2024.

A police source with intimate knowledge of McGovern’s arrest said: “What they [Dubai] started with is targeting those who were living ‘the life of Riley’.

“Those going to boxing matches, posting things on social media while having a Red Notice on them or being wanted, they felt it was disrespectful to Dubai.

“The arrest of McGovern opened the floodgates. They [the police] did it slowly, carefully, they didn’t communicate very much, it was all very sensitive.”

Assassination attempt

McGovern, 39, was extradited in May 2025 and is awaiting sentencing at Dublin’s Special Criminal Court, having pleaded guilty last month to two charges of directing the activities of a criminal organisation.

The Kinahans had relocated from their headquarters in Spain’s Marbella to Dubai following an assassination attempt on Daniel Kinahan on Feb 5 2016.

A group of gunmen disguised as Irish police opened fire on Kinahan and his retinue during the weigh-in of a world boxing match at the Regency Hotel in Dublin.

The attack was carried out by the rival Hutch Gang during a gangland war for control of Ireland’s underworld.

The gang’s alleged leader, 63-year-old Gerry Hutch, or “The Monk”, as he has been named by the Irish press for his ascetic lifestyle, is now running to be an independent candidate in the Dublin Central by-election.

Hutch has denied being an organised crime boss.

In the aftermath of the shooting, 19 people were killed on the streets of Dublin, including two civilians in a case of mistaken identity.

While in Dubai, Mr Kinahan sought to rebrand himself as a boxing promoter and was credited by Tyson Fury, the former heavyweight world champion, for helping broker a match between him and Anthony Joshua.

Although the fight never materialised, Mr Kinahan was repeatedly lauded by the roster of world champion fighters signed to his company, MTK Global, for securing deals unmatched by competitors.

Bob Arum, a 94-year-old Las Vegas boxing tycoon whose promotional company Top Rank included Muhammad Ali, George Foreman and Floyd Mayweather Jr in its stable, described Mr Kinahan as his “captain” and said he had always been “honourable”.

MTK Global shut down in 2022, the same year that the US government imposed a $5m (£3.7m) bounty for information leading to Mr Kinahan’s arrest.

Mr Arum has since publicly distanced himself from Mr Kinahan and said that, if he were aware of his criminal activities, “he wouldn’t have touched him with a 10-foot pole”.

The family’s whereabouts in Dubai were well known by authorities, according to a police source.

He dismissed suggestions that a joint investigation from Bellingcat, the Dutch journalism website, and The Sunday Times, which exposed Christy Kinahan Sr’s whereabouts via his Google Reviews of restaurants under an alias, had assisted law enforcement.

Daniel Kinahan, 48, was arrested on foot by a squad of Dubai Police officers on April 15.

Hamid Alzaabi, the secretary-general of the UAE’s national anti-money laundering committee, in a rare public announcement, declared afterwards on social media: “There is no safe haven for criminals in the UAE.”

Dubai ‘under pressure to behave’

Daniel Haberly, a senior lecturer from the Centre for the Study of Corruption at the University of Sussex, said: “Dubai has a serious bid to become one of the real apex global financial centres in the long run.

“There is international pressure for them to behave; they have the same architecture of Western security, it’s not a rogue state. They have to play along.”

Mr Kinahan is being held in Al Awir Central Prison, a sprawling complex in the middle of a desert.

The jail is a far cry from the splendour of his old residence, a 45-minute drive away.

Inmates have their heads shaved on arrival, something that Mr Kinahan, who is rumoured to have recently undergone a hair transplant, would feel particularly aggrieved about.

Dubai authorities also announced on Sunday that £168m of the family’s assets had been frozen.

Daniel Kinahan’s wife, Caoimhe Robinson, a property magnate reportedly living in a £5m mansion in the gated community of Hacienda with her four children, is said to be carrying out a fire sale of up to £1bn in assets.

She is not accused of wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, Irish police are keeping close tabs on his younger brother Christy Kinahan Jr, 45, who supposedly runs the money-laundering side of operations and is reluctant to “get his hands dirty”.

The family’s patriarch, Christy Sr, who has been subject to the same US bounty as his two sons, has stepped back from the cartel’s day-to-day operations but remains in police crosshairs.

Where Europe’s criminal elite will now set up shop is unclear.

Security sources have pointed to Sudan or Moscow as potential havens, given their governments’ links to corruption and harbouring of fugitives, but said neither could hope to match the splendour of Dubai.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]