DANIEL Kinahan lived like a king on the Costa del Sol, rubbing shoulders with boxing royalty and running what US authorities branded ‘one of the most dangerous criminal empires’ on Earth.
Despite decamping with his father and brother to Dubai when the heat got too much he continued to run Europe’s cocaine business with an iron grip.
Now Kinahan – for years the most wanted man to have called Spain home – is being frogmarched back to Ireland in a security operation so vast it involves the Irish army and a purpose-bought ‘bulletproof, bomb-resistant’ prison van.
In a high security operation – akin to the movement of the South American coca godfathers to the US – he is being extradited this weekend.
The 49-year-old was finally cornered in Dubai in April, years after the Spanish gangland’s most feared export slipped the net time and time again, almost certainly protected by a veil of corruption.
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An Irish government jet flew out to collect him last night, with his long-awaited return to Dublin expected today (Sunday) – straight into the dock of the country’s Special Criminal Court.
No expense has been spared for a man who moved in circles that included world champion boxers, such as Tyson Fury, who he regularly promoted and set up fights for.
The Irish Prison Service has splashed out on a specially armoured van built solely for high-risk prisoners like Kinahan, while armed gardaà and Irish Defence Forces troops back up prison staff for the handover.
Portlaoise Prison, Ireland’s maximum-security jail in County Laois, has had its facilities beefed up ahead of his arrival.
Once there he will be held on remand – a far cry from the villas and five-star hotels he was once known to frequent in glitzy Marbella and nearby Estepona.
Long before Dubai, it was the Costa del Sol that gave the Kinahan cartel its playground. From a base in Spain, the organisation is accused of building a cocaine empire that flooded markets right across Europe, bankrolled by the kind of brazen tactics that turned the coast into gangland’s front line for over a decade.
The Kinahan empire never really looked like a stereotypical cartel operation – and that was rather the point. Its most visible front was the Macklin’s Gym Marbella (MGM) boxing club, which Kinahan co-funded in Puerto Banús back in 2012 alongside former champion Matthew Macklin.
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For years it drew boxing royalty to the Costa del Sol, with the likes of Frank Bruno and Graeme Souness turning up ringside – and Kinahan himself was later pictured posing Fury, who became a friend.
The gym’s glamour masked a darker reality. In 2014, former European boxing champion Jamie Moore was shot outside Kinahan’s €10 million Estepona residence while training at MGM.
It was a case of mistaken identity that nearly cost him his life.
Two years later, dawn raids swept across six Costa del Sol properties linked to the cartel – including the gym itself – with police seizing cash, weapons, a yacht moored in Puerto Banús, and a Bentley and a Mercedes.
Kinahan’s own hideaway became a fortified terracotta mansion tucked into a ‘low-key’ millionaire’s row in Guadalmina, ringed with high walls, CCTV towers and alarm systems built to keep out intruders – or witnesses.
The gym itself, rebranded MTK Global, would not survive the fallout. It shut for good after the 2022 US Treasury sanctions named Daniel Kinahan directly, with promoters severing ties overnight and the business becoming the first public casualty of Washington’s crackdown.
Things came crashing down over a bloody public feud that erupted back in Dublin with the fellow Hutch clan, part-based in Lanzarote.
It was a vicious gang war that would go on to claim 18 lives – forcing the family to run further still.
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Kinahan himself cheated death in 2016, when gunmen dressed as police stormed a boxing weigh-in at Dublin’s Regency Hotel in an attack widely blamed on a rival gang.
He fled back to Spain before eventually resurfacing in Dubai, where the UAE finally caught up with Ireland’s most wanted man this spring.
The US Treasury sanctioned Kinahan and other senior family members in April 2022, branding the cartel one of the most dangerous criminal organisations on the planet – ranking it alongside the likes of Italy’s Camorra, Mexico’s Los Zetas and Japan’s Yakuza.
Other alleged lieutenants have faced justice on this side of the Mediterranean too. Thomas ‘Bomber’ Kavanagh, said by the UK’s National Crime Agency to have run the cartel’s British operations, was jailed for 21 years in 2022 alongside Gary Vickery and Daniel Canning – the latter two later found to be responsible for smuggling millions of pounds worth of cocaine and cannabis into the UK.
Kavanagh himself would later plead guilty to a separate weapons stash plot aimed at duping British police.
According to former Garda Commissioner Drew Harris, the cartel is estimated to have banked more than €1 billion globally from its activities over the years.
The US has separately put up a $5 million reward for information leading to the capture of the cartel’s three most senior figures: Daniel, his father Christopher Snr, and brother Christopher Jnr.
For all the villas, the yachts and the boxing ring photo-ops, Kinahan’s legal team maintains he has no criminal record or convictions, and insists claims he is a crime boss are false and without evidential basis.
That defence will now be tested in a Dublin courtroom – a long way from the Spanish sunshine that once made him gangland royalty on the Costa.
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