A SANCTIONED member of the Costa del Sol’s biggest drugs cartel has been tracked down playing padel in Dubai under a false name.
Ian Dixon, 36, was identified by investigators from Bellingcat and the Sunday Times, who traced him from an old padel club advert to a live-streamed tournament using facial recognition software.
The British broadsheet is now speculating that Dixon could be lined up to replace the fallen Daniel Kinahan as the new leader of the notorious Kinahan cartel.
Dixon is a cousin of Daniel Kinahan, 49, and Christopher Kinahan Jr, 45, the sons of cartel founder Christy Kinahan, 69.
READ MORE: PICTURE EXCLUSIVE: Irishman arrested over Gary Hutch murder named as MGM Marbella man
He grew up in Dublin before following the family to the Costa del Sol in the late 2000s, working behind the bar at the Auld Dubliner in Estepona, the Costa del Sol municipality that served as one of the cartel’s bases.
Despite trying to lie low, Dixon reappeared on the radar after reaching the final of the Asia Pacific Padel Tour’s Dubai Masters on December 13-15, 2024, competing under the alias ‘Ian Thomas.’
He lost the final and finished runner-up, picking up a silver medal and a commemorative racket on camera.
Investigators matched his face to a 2023 Instagram advert for the padel club, then to hours of tournament footage livestreamed on YouTube.
The Olive Press first reported on Dixon in 2016, after he was arrested during the murder investigation into Irish criminal Gary Hutch, who was shot dead the previous year in a gated community near Marbella.
Dixon was released without charge, and another Kinahan associate was later jailed for 22 years over the killing.
The Hutch murder triggered a gangland feud that has been linked to at least 18 deaths in Ireland, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands, as The Olive Press covered extensively at the time.
Before fleeing to Dubai along with the rest of the Kinahan clan some time around 2016, Dixon also worked as a trainer at MGM Marbella, the boxing gym co-founded by Daniel Kinahan that later became MTK Global before it shut down when the US sanctions were imposed.
The US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned Dixon, Christy Kinahan, Daniel and Christopher Jr in April 2022 – a designation that freezes any assets connected to the American financial system and bars US citizens and companies from doing business with those named.
Treasury officials said Dixon moved bulk cash across Europe for Daniel Kinahan, arranged payments and tracked debts owed by drug traffickers.
Dixon has no known criminal convictions.
He controlled Hoopoe Sports LLC, a Dubai company representing professional boxers.
Boxing promoter Bob Arum told Yahoo Sports the firm was paid more than €3.5 million for arranging Tyson Fury’s Las Vegas fights, money he said was owed to Daniel Kinahan as a consulting fee.
Dixon lived in a gated Dubai community where comparable villas are listed at up to around €2.4 million.
He was also filmed at the same tournament greeting Stephen Jamieson, a Scottish trafficker who was arrested in Dubai the following July and is now serving six years in a Scottish prison.
The Sunday Times has valued the wider Kinahan network at around €1.3 billion, spanning drug trafficking, money laundering and arms smuggling.
A separate assessment tied to Europol found that Daniel Kinahan was part of a six-man ‘super cartel’ that controlled around a third of the cocaine entering Europe, worth an estimated €17.5 billion a year.
Bellingcat and the Sunday Times reported in March that cartel associate Mounir Lazzez, a former UFC fighter, was linked to tankers shipping sanctioned Iranian crude oil to China, evading US sanctions on Tehran.
The Sunday Times said that investigation was the catalyst for Daniel Kinahan’s arrest the following month.
Daniel Kinahan, regarded as the cartel’s overall leader, was arrested at his Dubai home on April 17 under a warrant issued by Irish authorities and is currently awaiting extradition to Ireland for what will surely be a blockbuster trial.
His arrest has left the cartel without a day-to-day commander for the first time in over a decade.
Three of the seven men sanctioned in 2022 have now been arrested: Daniel Kinahan; Johnny Morrissey, held in Spain and later bailed under a travel ban; and Sean McGovern, extradited from Dubai and jailed for 24 years earlier this year for directing violence on the cartel’s behalf.
That leaves Christy Kinahan, Christopher Kinahan Jr, Dixon and cartel lieutenant Bernard Clancy as the last of the original seven still at large.
Of those four, every account of Dixon’s role – including the Treasury’s own sanctions notice – describes him as a financial fixer, not a boss.
Succession in an organisation like this typically follows both family and seniority, and both previous boss Christy Kinahan, the cartel’s 69-year-old founder, and his son Christopher Jr, 45, remain free and outrank Dixon in the structure investigators have described.
It could be, however, that they are considered to have too much ‘heat’ on them, paving the way for a new and young leader to rise up the ranks.
Ireland’s Garda Commissioner, Justin Kelly, has said the investigation into the cartel’s remaining figures is continuing, but no law enforcement agency has publicly named an heir apparent.
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