Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Daniel Kinahan, King of Spin, a four part crime world special. Part two, business as usual. We're talking about a phone call and we're playing some extracts from it that you had with Daniel Kinahan on the 29th of January 2021. And we're really going back to sort of unravel what's happening here.
And in the first part, we spoke about the emergence of the boxing club in Spain and how MGM, as it was called, started to grow and grow and grow. And Daniel Kinahan's ambitions as a boxing promoter grew with it. We need to talk now about the aftermath of the Regency Hotel attack in 2016, which really put the focus of the world's media.
And it was the world's media in those days or at that point in time, because it had been a public event. Hundreds of people in attendance, children, etc. A shooting that was captured on mobile phones not long after the Bataclan terrorist attack in France. And we were only starting to get used to these live streams, essentially, of things like that.
And I think that's what really threw the Regency attack onto the world stage. But Daniel Kinahan being the, you know, he was the target of that. He escaped, obviously, and his friend David Byrne was murdered. He goes back to kind of normal life.
By March 2016, just weeks really after David Byrne has been murdered and has been buried, he attends a boxing event in London and it features some of his boxers. He poses for a photograph at this point with a guy called Alan Shrek Hart. And he subsequently goes back to the gym in Spain where he again poses for a couple of photographs and he's
tweeting about the boxing and it's like as if there is a concerted effort to ignore the Regency Hotel. Macklin has a bout due up and he's on the undercard of the International Boxing Federation's heavyweight title fight between Anthony Joshua and Charles Martin at the O2 in London.
Yeah, so it's certainly the Regency, it's the death knell for the MTK in Ireland or MGM. But it continues on an international scale and, you know, the people associated with MTK are still being interviewed totally normally on the British media. For example, Jamie Moore, who... who's the shooting of Jamie Moore, of course, in Daniel Kinahan's villa in 2015.
Some people, and we heard it said, was the beginning of the feud, the first shot of the feud. But he's still speaking about Kinahan in a very effusive and giving him a lot of praise. He launches his book, Morsi, The Fighter's Fighter. And he describes Kinahan's role that night he got shot. And we know, of course, now that that shooting was carried out by members of the Hutch faction.
He writes, Daniel sprinted over the gates and called the ambulance. As the gates opened, the armed police threw him face down on the floor and handcuffed him. Then they stormed in with guns to the garden. I started shouting, the gunman is gone and this man is my friend. Get me an ambulance. I'm bleeding to death.
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Chapter 2: What events followed the Regency Hotel attack in 2016?
This seems to be kind of the main reason he wants to go pro at this point. So we haven't, this hasn't been announced, but this is going on in the background. And then, Ken, there's a bump in the road again. In September 2016, the Guardi and the Spanish police launch a series of raids around the Costa and video footages released.
Yeah, this was very high profile. It was an exciting morning in the newsroom when all this stuff got released. And essentially, the target of the operation was James Quinn, a nephew of Martin the Viper Foley, a very serious criminal, a childhood friend of Daniel Kinahan's. And also, the shooter, sorry to...
the chief suspect at the time and ultimately convicted of the murder of Gary Hutch back in September 2015 that actually started this murderous feud. So he was brought into custody. There was photos of him. It was a really, really big deal. And he ultimately got convicted of that offence and he's serving a very significant sentence in a Spanish jail at the moment for that murder.
There were some curious details that were released around the time, including that when he was arrested, he had this sort of dog-eared photograph of Jean Boylan in his wallet. And there was a suggestion from those who knew him that she had sort of helped raise him, had been very kind to him and that they'd almost been brothers.
But ultimately, Quinn had been employed by the Kinnahan cartel as an in-house hitman.
Yes. And an enforcer. He had a number of very serious convictions here in Ireland. And one of them was for a particularly bad aggravated burglary. Quinn would be known as an individual who used extreme violence. Very little niceties about him. And look, we spoke a bit in the...
In a previous chat about bodyguards and so on, Quinn would be a hard man for someone that Daniel would like to have around him. Ultimately, those raids, and there was a lot of publicity, he has been in custody ever since.
The friendship was useful in that case to Daniel Kinahan. Yes. So in the meantime, so part of those raids include a raid on the MGM gym and we see footage of the police bursting in the door of the gym. You're kind of thinking... Finally, in a way. You know, how has it gone on this long with the kind of characters that were in there?
It felt like it was a headquarters of something, even though, of course, Matthew Macklin is still fronting it at this point. And it is essentially his gym. But the gym is raided, which seems like damaging in the extreme or it should be to the business. But... But we discover, Niall, and I remember you and I sitting down over a computer.
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Chapter 3: How did Daniel Kinahan continue his boxing promotion after the attack?
And you can't get any further in terms of searching those documents at the time. And there's, because they had a number of companies, some of them are for promotion, some of them are for for the intellectual rights. It's not just all just one company. MGM Events Limited Scotland had a joint shareholding with the same company.
So you can see these on the Scottish property office, but it's just... It goes ghost when it hits ghost.
the Emirates you can't see anything, you can't access any documents etc.
There's a reason for all that which is why Dubai attracts these kind of people but it seems as if MGM is becoming obviously a much more complex structure than it has been because we later find out of course that MGM was founded by Daniel Kinahan, Matthew Macklin, they were co-owners until a point where they sell up and it starts to become a little bit of something it Never was.
Now, Ken, the biggest change again at this point is probably that Christopher and Daniel Kinahan moved to Dubai. They follow their father.
Yes. So I suppose there's lots of reasons. The European arrest warrant system, there's lots of reasons for them to get out of Spain, particularly in the aftermath of the Regency attack. And I suppose what we shouldn't forget, like, As all these boxing developments are happening, there's absolute mayhem going on on the streets of Dublin and further afield in relation to the feud.
Innocent people are being killed and maybe not so innocent. They'd obviously drawn up their cartel, they'd drawn up their hit list. of who was involved in the Regency Hotel attack. And some of those Hutch family members were murdered. There was a young man killed in a case of mistaken identity in the north inner city.
There was the monk's brother was murdered, obviously, in the aftermath of the Regency. And Noel Duggan was killed simply because he's an associate of Gerry the Monk Hutch. So, and that's just...
And there's fear on the streets of Dublin. There was armed guardie patrolling the north inner city as kids went to school. It was something we'd never seen before. It felt like there was a very dark cloud over the city and that there was this absolute, you know, revenge was in the air.
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Chapter 4: What significant business developments occurred for MGM in 2016?
We have, in the spring of 2017, the cartel finalising its plans to bring Imre Arrakis to Dublin. So that he can murder James Maggo Gately in Belfast. There's been a lot of takedowns of hit teams. There's been a lot of success. I think the Gardaí have basically said that not only have they made arrests, but they've also saved lives.
Yeah, in total, as 2017 was to conclude. The Gardaí release figures, they were involved in 26 life-saving interventions that particular year. The vast, vast majority of them were linked to this feud, the Hutch Kinahan feud. And, you know, it provided great drama for us in terms of... Some of these operations were staggering.
The level of surveillance that the guards had on the criminals, you know, in the years ahead, all that stuff would be kind of laid bare in court hearings. So, look, I think probably 2017 was arguably probably the most active year of the feud. There was incidences all the time. Even... I think a boxing fight that you referenced there as well on, I think it was Paddy's Day that particular year.
There was not one, but within a few minutes, two attempts to murder a relation of the Hutch's, Eddie Staunton, very close to our offices here. It was on a Sunday night. Ultimately, it was botched. And again... He survived without serious injuries, but definitely connected to the feud.
So while there was this big boxing event happening elsewhere on the streets here, it was a completely different story. There was, I don't know, it's wrong to call it a comical effort in relation to Mr Staunton, but they went after him not once but twice, but he did survive.
And that really highlights the two distinct strands of Daniel Kinahan's life at this point, you know, on the same night, an attempted murder plus a big boxing event. So you've got the two things going on there. In May of 2017, Tyson Fury shows up. He begins this new training regime at the gym in Spain, which is still open and operating, along with his pal, a boxer called Billy Joe Saunders.
And... Basically, videos started being released. Remember they looked comical in the beginning? There was, you know, Tyson was enormous. He had put on all this weight. He had fallen off the wagon. He had been in a bad way for a long time. The former world champion was sort of seen as being left in the scrap heap.
But Kinnahan had taken him on and he was adamant he was going to lose all this weight and he was going to get back to full fitness. And He was sort of a bit, he was a bit of a man mountain and himself and, you know, Billy Joe Saunders would be jogging at night in Marbella, presumably because it's too hot during the day, running through fountains, having a bit of banter.
And it all looked like really good fun. Again, it all looked a little bit something that was a bit far fetched. How was Tyson Fury going to come back from... the brink. But Fury becomes very important in Kinahan's story. And his trainer, Ben Davison, would later say, he would later describe where Fury was when Daniel Kinahan plucked him from that scrap heap.
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Chapter 5: How did the Kinahan cartel adapt to increased police scrutiny in 2017?
Yeah, I mean, if we talked about the sophistication of the Kinahan cartel propaganda wing, The Whistleblower is of another nature. kind of category, isn't it? It's much more crude, blunt, but it starts to have a big impact. And of course, it's suspected it's run by the Hutch gang.
And clearly, the person who's running the site does have inside information, although not everything that they're said on it is correct either. And it has this constant, a couple of narratives it puts out. In particular, it accuses Kenan of being an MI6 informer. He says that he's nicknamed Cancer. Everybody who touches Kenan basically ends up dead or suffering.
And it constantly links him to murders. It also continues to tag people in Dubai, in particular Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Muqattam and the Dubai police. And it's relentless, I think. At one point... James Boland, who's the head of the Garda organised crime and drugs bureaus, spoke to you about some of what's going on in cyberspace.
It was, and it wasn't long before I sat down with Superintendent Boland that that actual Twitter account was in a position to publish Daniel Kinahan's and his brother Christopher's and I think his father's actual official verified identity documents that they had in Dubai. So that I suppose indicates that they had some level of inside knowledge to be able to do that.
So that seems very long ago now. As you said, Seamus Boland is basically the head of the Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau and has been for many years. And the chat kind of did end up focusing a lot on social media campaigns by both sides. And, you know, he was basically pointing out that it was a cause of concern for Gardaí that, you know, both sides were putting out propaganda campaigns.
And it was something he pointed out that was being actively monitored all the time by them.
Did he give you any indication of who was running them, like what sort of level of the groupings were actually in charge of them?
He didn't name names, but what he did say was that it was being run at a very high level and he indicated his suspicions, whereas a lot of it was being done from outside the country.
And he said, like, read the quote he gives you, because he says there's a purpose to this as well. It's not just about, you know, slagging people off. He says, we believe that people at the top level are controlling these accounts. These accounts have been generally set up to put certain stories into the public domain.
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