December 21, 2023 • 35 mins
Daniel Kinahan is more influential than ever, but law enforcement may finally be catching up.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
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Speaker 2 (00:57):
Previously on Hot Money, US undercover agents made a connection
between money launderers working for European drug traffickers and top
level officials in Iran. It was part of a ski
to help the regime evade American sanctions and source heavy weapons.
This time, a whole new money laundering operation comes into view,
(01:20):
invented by the man at the top of the Dubai Supercartel,
Daniel Kinahan. Back in episode four, we left him living
a life of luxury in Dubai. He just got married
and business was booming as the supercartel joined forces to
grow their trafficking operations. Across Europe and Daniel his new
(01:40):
career as a boxing manager. It was about to take off.
Remember back in Spain, he helped open a gym called
MTK and signed up and coming boxers from Ireland. In
the UK, he set them up in nice villas and
hired the best trainers and arranged their fights. Unlike his father,
Daniel appeared to like being a public figure to revel
in the attention he got. He was living a dual life,
(02:04):
enjoying the status of a top drug trafficker and the
image of a high flying boxing promoter. It seemed to
me that he thought boxing was his path to being
accepted as a legitimate businessman, but something inside him meant
he just couldn't leave the world of crime behind. Now
it's twenty twenty, Daniel kinahans in Dubai and he's taken
(02:25):
his boxing promotion business there with him. He's working on
the biggest boxing deal of his life and if he
pulls it off, it will catapult him to the very
top of the sport.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
Hello there, I'm just after getting off the phone with
Daniel Kinahan.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
That's world famous heavyweight champion Tyson Fury. He's a fast
talking shaven headed nineteen stone Man Mountain and on that
afternoon he's even more excitable than usual. He posts on
social media, He's just informed.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
Me that the biggest fight in Bridges boxing history has
just been agreed.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
Gear that my boy.
Speaker 5 (03:03):
Big shout out done.
Speaker 6 (03:04):
He got this done.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Two fight deal Tyson Fury versus Anthony josh next year.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
The announcement it stuns the world of boxing. After winning
a world heavyweight title five years earlier, Fury's career it's
been in a slump, but since meeting Daniel Kinahan, he's
made an epic comeback. He's beaten the previously undefeated and
reigning WBC champion Deonte Wilder in this huge Las Vegas showdown,
(03:33):
and that means Fury's upcoming bout against fellow British heavyweight
Anthony Joshua. It's immediately billed as one of the biggest
fights in the history of the sport. It's going to
be an international extravaganza broadcast across the world. Pay per
view sales and sponsorship are going to generate hundreds of
millions of dollars and Fury he's crediting Daniel Kinahan with
(03:54):
pulling the whole thing together, and Daniel's not only organizing
these box office prize fights, He's also started to rub
shoulders with Royalty. Around the same time that Fury's fights announced,
Daniels signed up as a special advisor on combat sports
by a company belonging to the Prince of Bahrain. The
press release describes him as an international boxing powerbroker. And
(04:16):
shortly before that, Daniel shows up with a charity gala
in Kazakhstan wearing a tuxedo and sitting next to him
is none other than Bob Aarum, one of the most
influential figures in boxing history.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
Aram.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
He's promoted Muhammad Ali and he's an inductee into the
Boxing Hall of Fame.
Speaker 5 (04:34):
We have great confidence in Kenahan. We think he's very very,
very honest, very astute. He has great connections.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
And now he's singing the praises of Daniel Kinahan.
Speaker 5 (04:47):
You know, I like to deal with guys, no nonsense,
people whose word is their bond, and that's what it's
been with Daniel.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
But just as Daniel Kinahan's reputation as a boxing magnate
starts to soar, some people are starting to look more
closely at the source of his fortune. I'm Miles Johnson
and from the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries. This is
Hot Money, season two, the New Narcos, episode seven, Against
(05:23):
the Ropes. The thing that first pulled me into this
(05:46):
story was when a source told me, if you really
want to understand the exploding European cocaine trade, you need
to take a close look at a murder in a
small Dutch town. And that led me to an Amsterdam
murder broker, a Dublin safehouse, the Kinnahans, and then the
Iranian government. For a while, the way this connection worked,
(06:07):
it just wasn't clear, and then we found something. The
thing that links these unlikely characters together is the mechanics
of sanctions of Asian and money laundering. But if anyone
can help me really understand how all of this works,
it's a guy called Quentin mug.
Speaker 7 (06:25):
I'm a French police commander. I am currently working in
the EUROPEOL which he's the European agency for criminal police.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
I first met Quentin after other police contacts told me
that he was one of the best in the world
at complex money laundering cases. He's got dark, floppy hair,
a stubbly beard, and he talks with the unassuming calmness
of a gallic colombo. He doesn't miss a trick if
you're trying to launder your drugs money in a shipman
of seafood. He's the sort of guy who'll swivel around
(06:57):
at the last minute and say just one more thing.
Speaker 7 (07:01):
You know, instinct kicks in. You tell me is that
you imported a hundred thousand euros worth of shrimps. But
what shrimp was at a frozen shrimp big streams? But
I guess cash scrips? Then what was exactly in the continue?
You don't know. That's that's how it.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
Works, Quentin. He lives and breathes this sort of stuff,
and he's actually written a book about it. It's called
gen Salle or Dirty Money.
Speaker 7 (07:25):
So I started to pick up on these aspects of
the job because essentially everybody wakes up for money, including
the criminals, and I really started to enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
Quentin actually worked on part of the DEA's investigation into
Iman Kobesi and ended up arresting a French associate of hers.
He says there's one important reason why drug traffickers might
end up working with someone like Kobesi. Criminals and sanctioned governments.
They've got a problem in common. They can't just freely
move money around the international banking system, so both need
(07:57):
to find more creative methods, methods that law enforcement agencies
can't track.
Speaker 7 (08:02):
And that is the beauty of it, to be honest,
because basically this appeal for and a NIMI is something
that the wood underworld has in common.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
As a cocaine market in Europe has boomed, massive amounts
of dirty cash are started to pile up and to
make their businesses work to pay suppliers in Latin America,
pay henchmen, or buy a mansion in Dubai. The car
tells they need to keep that money from getting stuck.
It's a critical logistical headache of being a drug trafficker
but moving billions secretly around the world. It's actually quite hard.
(08:38):
Imagine a drug trafficker has say ten million dollars in
the Netherlands and.
Speaker 7 (08:42):
You would like that to be in Dubai. So now
he's got a number of options. You could move it himself,
as that's been setting some cash careers, taking zerisk of
being spudied at the airport. He could try to transform
it into something else, maybe jewelry, wa cheese, whatever. But
again you need to transport it. You could try to
(09:02):
hide these tracks by converting that money into other goods
such as cars, and then ship them away, get the
cars somewhere in another country, sell them, justify the profit
and take it away. But then you need companies, you
need important But it's complete lydy. Oh, you can just
pick up your phone.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
Pick up your phone and call a money broker. They're
specialists to operate in a huge underground banking system and
it's critical infrastructure for the underworld.
Speaker 7 (09:29):
So I would simply contact the money brokers. The money
broker would send me a money collector. That money collector
will come to me, usually with a banknote.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
It's pretty hard to feel comfortable handing over massive suitcases
of cash to a stranger, so they've come up with
a sort of verification system. The person picking up the
cash they have to show a serial number of a
specific banknote to prove their identity.
Speaker 7 (09:55):
And it was in two three days, I would have
an equivalent talment of money in the country I want.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
So it's sort of like a secret currency exchange service,
but for major criminals. But the concept that took me
a little while to get my head around is that
the actual physical cash it doesn't ever move. It stays
in the same place. The networks have supplies of cash
in different countries, in places like warehouses, and instead of
(10:23):
moving it, they simply pay you out from the supply
they have in the place you need it, minus a commission.
Of course, this works because people doing the reverse trade
to you, customers moving money in the other direction, they
will replenish the supply of cash from where you collected
it at one of the networks to facto offices around
the world.
Speaker 7 (10:41):
The most basic often comes in the form of a
little shop grocery stores that opens late and so very
expensive apples, and then everybody goes. But how is it
possible that it is still open where.
Speaker 6 (10:59):
There's a lot of that.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Before I'd heard about this, I'd assumed that modern money
laundering was high tech, using things like cryptocurrencies or complex
financial instruments. Actually really surprised to learn that it's pretty
old school. Quentin says that this modern shadow banking system,
it's similar to the principles of hawala networks that were
used by Eastern traders from the fourteenth century.
Speaker 7 (11:21):
So the Hawala system is basically a very ancient system
that consisting is based on trust and it's based on
a network of Hawala dhas before running this kind of
informal network. It was used a long time ago, even
in the Middle Aged when you were traveling, you didn't
want to, you know, wander around the roads with golden use.
(11:42):
So what you would do you would make a deposits
in the merchant who has an agreement with his suppliers.
Let's say I don't know it's the Middle East, and
then when you would arrive there, you would choose a
note and somebody would give you an equivalent amount of
money based on trust.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
I'm also just interested in the capacity of his systems
because we're talking hundreds of millions of not billions potentially
of money. The liquidity that deep that you can move
that much money through this.
Speaker 7 (12:13):
Start it's going to be a short term swer it yes, wow,
it is.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
So there are billions of dollars circulating through these black
market brokers, and it's not just drug barons who are
using them. There are tax evaders, human traffickers, warlords, terrorist groups,
and people moving money for sanctioned governments. There's this strange
thing in Europe and it's that the number of physical
banknotes in circulation over the last decade, it's actually gone up,
(12:43):
but the number of people paying for stuff with cash,
it's gone down. And central banks they can have a
pretty hard time knowing where all of that physical cash
has gone. In the UK alone, the Bank of England,
it believes that there's about fifty billion pounds in cash
in circulation, but it just can't be accounted for. No
one knows where it is. And meanwhile, Quentin's seeing signs
(13:07):
that the number of money brokers is going on.
Speaker 7 (13:10):
I've seen the commission drop. It's not a good sign
because they're asking for less and less money. Zans that
there are more and more competitors and there is more
and more money out there.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
Like Quentin said at the start, everybody in the world
a crime. They wake up for money. And over in
the United States, one lawyer is starting to dig deeper
into the Kinahan money machine.
Speaker 4 (13:33):
In the Middle East, Daniel Kinahan is living in Dubai.
They're having a party in Dubai. They're getting away with,
(13:53):
you know, a lot of stuff. It seems to be
in Dubai and he felt, I think untouchable.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Eric Montalvo is an attorney in Washington, DC and before
getting into law, he served for twenty one years as
an active duty marine in the US military in the
First Golf War in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
Speaker 4 (14:11):
When I transitioned into the civilian community, I eventually started
my firm in twenty eleven and I practice national international law.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
And then one day in twenty twenty, Eric got a
call from a boxing promoter who was furious one of
the promoters most successful fighters was leaving. He'd switch to
another promotion company, one called MTK. It's the company that
Daniel Kinahan co founded back in Spain, and by twenty
twenty one, MTK Global, like Daniel, is based in Dubai.
(14:44):
MTK has become a major player in the boxing world
and this fighter he wants to move over to them,
but he's still under contract, so there's a dispute, and
the current promoter asked Eric to take on his case.
Speaker 4 (14:57):
Before this, I was not really a boxing litigator, if
you will, like the boxing profession was not something that
I was intimately familiar with in terms of the business side. Right,
you know, I'm a fan and I would watch a fight,
you know what have you, But I really had never
got from a litigation standpoint into the back end of
(15:17):
what was going on, so I really was in a
learning curve on this.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
Eric's not studying the contracts, and MTK looks just like
any other multinational company.
Speaker 4 (15:27):
On its face, it looked very legitimate and very powerful
compared to even any US company. No one could really
compete with them, and they had endorsements from high level
boxing professionals, right Bob aram So my first review of
them was that they were a big professional boxing corporation
(15:47):
international and that I just had to hold them accountable
for contract issues.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
But then Eric comes across the name Daniel Kinahan. At
the time, back in twenty twenty one, most of the
boxing world had embraced Kinahan as a legitimate businessman, Eric's
or something else.
Speaker 4 (16:06):
When I focused in on him, obviously, I'm a former prosecutor,
so you know that got my eyebrows raised.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
Now, there's a long history in boxing of people with
let's say, a colorful past, and initially Eric thought that
the rumors around Daniel Kinahan would have no bearing on
the contractual dispute. But as Eric started to look at
MTK's business model, it seemed strange. One of the ways
that the company was able to recruit so many fighters
to its roster was by offering them hugely favorable terms,
(16:40):
terms that seemed to defy financial logic.
Speaker 4 (16:43):
When I started trying to understand the financials of what
was happening, nothing made sense. No business can spend the
amount of money in litigation, you know, fighter bonuses, all
of these things when that money is not coming from fights.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
For example, you could have a situation where a boxer makes,
say five hundred thousand dollars in a fire, but the
boxing company promoting them pays them seven hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 4 (17:14):
Where's that money coming from.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
Daniel Kinahan had officially parted ways with MTK back in
twenty seventeen. His links to organized crime had made it
difficult to be the public face of the company.
Speaker 4 (17:25):
Everyone's paying attention to you, probably for a good reason,
so you know, take a back seat and you're no
longer part of MTK. The problem is is that mister
Kinahan wasn't able to do that. He either loved the
boxing game, loved the limelight whatever it was, but he
could not help himself, and so he was publicly coming
out over and over again and participating in the fighting arena.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
And as Eric digs deeper into MTK's finances, he discovers
that the company seems to have found an innovative way
of moving money around the globe.
Speaker 4 (17:59):
It became clear to me as a prosecutor that what
they were doing is they were using the fighters as
a way to move money through the system. And so preliminarily,
what I see is that let's say they put a
million dollars in the fighter's account that wasn't for the
fighter to keep. What it was was they would then
(18:21):
take that money out a month or two later, and
then it would go to a property or go to
some other venture from the fighter's account. And these were
typically new accounts, so the fighter would set up a
new account, there would be a very significant amount of
money coming in to the account, and then that money
(18:43):
would leave shortly thereafter, and you go to pay for
some other thing that's unrelated to the fighter or anything else.
So that is money laundering.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
Let's stop here for a moment, because what Eric claims
is happening using boxing to launder money. It's a pretty
serious allegation. Up until now, most people have seen Daniel
Kinahan's rise in boxing as an attempt to clean up
his reputation. But maybe, if Eric's right, it was more
than that. The boxing and the crime, they weren't two
(19:21):
different worlds, they were part of the same thing. Eric's
next move is to file a legal case in California
for his client. It says MTK is quote overseen by
mister Daniel Kinahan, and that Kinnahan started MTK to quote
laun the ill gotten gains from drug trafficking. It was
part of a civil claim seeking compensation from MTK. MTK
(19:45):
responds it strongly denies what it called wild allegations, and
it says MTK Global is not a front for a
European drug cartel, does not engage in money laundering, and
does not make money from the sale of illicit drugs.
It also denied having any ongoing ties to Daniel Kinahan.
We should also be clear that there's no suggestion that
(20:08):
the boxers associated with MTK were involved in any criminal activity.
At the time Eric's theory, it wasn't a popular one.
Speaker 4 (20:19):
Most of the people that were around me that knew
what I was doing thought I was a little bit
of a crackpot, right like you know, what are you
talking about. Like, first of all, MTK's legitimate, you know organization.
I mean, people were saying as Bob Aaron was saying it,
the California Commissioner was saying it. Everybody was like, you know,
this Montavo guy is crazy and all of the stuff.
Speaker 8 (20:40):
You're going up in this instance against people who at.
Speaker 5 (20:45):
The time.
Speaker 8 (20:47):
Are seen as extremely dangerous, you know, like some of
the most dangerous criminals in the whole world, people who
are linked to multiple, multiple homicides. And I was just
wondering what you were sort of thinking at the time
about that part of it.
Speaker 4 (21:02):
I mean, in terms of my own personal safety or.
Speaker 8 (21:05):
In terms of your own personal safety.
Speaker 4 (21:07):
Maybe I'm not, you know, the most normal person in
the world, but I mean, you know, I went to
war at twenty right, I'm not gonna not do what
I have to do because I'm afraid that's somehow shape
or form, someone's gonna want me dead because I'm complaining
about what they're doing.
Speaker 9 (21:27):
You know.
Speaker 4 (21:27):
I just if that's the case, I shouldn't be an
attorney right.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
To start the US legal case against Kinahan. They're going
to have to find him so they can serve him
the papers and finding a man who's been busy evading
law enforcement agencies for years. It might sound a bit tricky,
but Eric had a plan.
Speaker 4 (21:44):
When you're trying to be a legitimate businessman, you have
to register your business, and so in Dubai it's no
different right they expect you to file the proper documents,
et cetera. So once I saw he was in Dubai,
I focused my efforts there. And if you look at
Palm Islands, right, there's two of them.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
They're two man made islands jutting out from the coast
of both engineered in the shape of palm trees so
that each luxury property has its own waterfront.
Speaker 4 (22:15):
And if you have the amount of money that you
know mister Kinahan has access to, and you know the
pictures and everything else you see, it made sense that
he was likely living on one of those islands.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
So Eric he'd figured out where Daniel Kinahan was living
in Dubai, and he'd hired someone to go and deliver
the US court papers to his address. Now, the next
question was how would Daniel respond. So Daniel's figuring out
(23:01):
how to deal with this legal case against him, and
at the same time there are now signs that Dubai,
once a paradise for your criminals, has begun to crack down.
The first members of the supercartel are starting to fall.
Ridu Antargi one of the guests at Daniel Kinahan's wedding
and a notorious Dutch cocaine boss. He's arrested in Dubai
(23:23):
and charged with multiple murders, and the Emirate agrees to
send him back to the Netherlands to face trial. Another
wedding guest, the Chilean traffick are known as El Rico.
He's arrested in Latin America and extracited to the Netherlands.
Two Daniel Kinahan's still safe in Dubai, but the pressure
back in Ireland is starting to build. There's outrage in
(23:44):
the Irish Parliament. The day after Tyson Fury posts about
Kinahan arranging the Joshua fight. Leova redcar Ireland's TISUK, the
Prime Minister. He says he's taken aback by Kinahan's involvement,
citing his checkered past. He asks Iland's Foreign ministry to
talk to the UAE government about it urgently. Days later,
the Prince of Barren dumps Kinahan as an advisor, and
(24:07):
Bob Aarum announces that he's going to have or Tyson
furious negotiations from now on, not Daniel Kinahan. Daniel's now
on the back foot, and he makes a kind of
surprising decision. He launches a public relations campaign to save
his reputation as a legitimate businessman. A bizarre film appears
on the Internet called The Regency Discover the Truth.
Speaker 6 (24:30):
And this isn't some.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Cobbled together home video. It's a professional project. It's a
dramatic reenactment of the assassination attempt against Daniel in twenty
sixteen in Dublin. It features a handsome actor playing him,
who's portrayed as the victim in the whole thing.
Speaker 4 (24:47):
When Daniel Kinahan arrived at the Wayne.
Speaker 3 (24:49):
For Clash of the Clans, the first thing that he
noticed was that there were no Gada to police the event.
This was unnerving because Daniel was used to having his
every move shadowed by police.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
Not only that, it's unlikely the film convinced anyone, but
it showed that Daniel Kinahan was starting to get nervous.
Back in Dublin, John O'Driscoll, the man in charge of
Island's response to the Kinahan's wave of violence. He's been
watching Daniels rise in boxing with frustration.
Speaker 6 (25:21):
The sport of boxing which is very important, and I
knew it to be so, having policed in inner city
communities for many years, many kids were diverted from crime
through an involvement in the sport of boxing, and here
we saw the Kinahan organization potentially destroying that sport. They
(25:42):
were corrupting the sport and that was operating at a
global level.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
John's been trying to come up with a plan, a
plan to take the Kinahans down. But even if they
build a bulletproof case, there's another problem. The Kinahans are
in Dubai, and Dubai has no formal extradition agreement with Ireland.
John he realizes something.
Speaker 6 (26:06):
That no one entity, no one law enforcement entity, could
ever achieve any realistic success on its own entackling one
of these criminal enterprises.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
So John starts flying around the world, meeting with other
law enforcement agencies, sharing information, discussing strategies. He knows that
back in twenty ten, police across Europe tried to stop
the kiinner Hans with Operation Shovel, but the case had
fallen apart, and John He's determined that will never happen again.
He needs a silver bullet. Then one morning he's talking
(26:42):
to a US official when they mentioned something that John
just hadn't thought about before. Something the US government has
used to go after people in countries like Russia, Iran,
and North Korea, countries in which Western governments can't just
go in and arrest people places like Dubai. What if
the official asked John, they put the Kiinner Hands under
(27:04):
economic sanctions the Irish police, they may not be able
to get close to the kin Hands in Dubai if
the US Treasury put them under sanctions, that would cut
them off from their money, the motive for being in
crime in the first place.
Speaker 6 (27:19):
From that day, it was part of our objective that
we would acquire sufficient information to provide to the US
Department of Treasury to encourage it to take on the
Kinnahans as a target, for them to be placed under
a list of priorities.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
It was just an idea, but it was a radical one,
a new tool to target individuals connected to European organized crime.
John immediately gets to work. He needs to bring in
as many international partners into the operation as possible, but
to convince the US Treasury to take action, the joint
operation needs watertight evidence that the Kinnahans have evolved into
(28:00):
a global threat.
Speaker 6 (28:02):
Throughout the process, I would have been privy to the
intelligence that we had gathered ourselves in Ireland, and then
other jurisdictions had gathered additional information, and bit by bit
dijigsaw was being put together in terms of establishing how
significant in fact the Kenahans were on the global stage.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Months and months passed, with countless meetings between law enforcement
agencies from different countries sharing the intelligence they've gathered on
the Kinnahans, and then the US side of the joint
operation they discovered something pretty big. At the time, it
was a closely guarded piece of highly sensitive information. John
tells me it was something about how the Kinahans and
(28:45):
other members of the Dubai supercartel had been laundering their money,
about the money brokers that we heard about earlier in
the episode.
Speaker 6 (28:52):
As time emerged and as the eyes of US law
enforcement more generally were focused on the Kenhen's, it was
realized that the money laundering associated with that drugs empire
involved the Kenahan's utilize organizations that may potentially have links
(29:13):
to international terrorism.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
As we're talking, as John's telling me this, I want
to know what he means which international terrorists? Is it
a group, is it a government? But when you say
terrorist related to activity, does that relate to any particular countries.
John doesn't really answer this, so I ask him directly
the thing I'm thinking, the thing you might be thinking too.
(29:36):
Is he talking about Iran.
Speaker 6 (29:38):
Well, that would be a conclusion that would be reached
primarily by the US authorities haven't been satisfied having received
initially information from the Irish law enforcement, UK law enforcement,
and they then pursuing that line of inquiry, would then
(30:00):
have concluded that, in fact, there is potential that there
is a financing of activity that can could be associations
with the Iranian station.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
John's saying it in a guarded way, but here's what
it sounds like to me. It's the money, the money laundering,
that's the connection between the Kinahans, the supercartel and Iran.
An Udi Levy, the former head of the Mossad's Economic
warfare unit, He says the same thing. He tells me
that Iran's money laundering channels are regularly used by criminal
(30:36):
networks across the world as well as other sanctioned governments.
Speaker 9 (30:40):
The sanction caused the Iranian to be very creative to
find I think today the number one in the world
out of circlements the sanction how to build very very
smart way to laundering money. They are giving a suggestion
(31:01):
to the Irusian and other countries and the North Korean
out to circlements the sanction, they became so expert they.
Speaker 4 (31:08):
Know very well how to do it.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
And as we know, it's not just sanctioned regimes that
need to find secret ways of moving money around the world.
Speaker 9 (31:16):
No, the direct trafficking need the ideas and their way
out to build infrastructure that nobody identify. So and they
run and have today, I think the best infrastructure in
the world to transfer money from one point to the
other and that nobody will have identified. So not only
(31:40):
that they are using the direct trafficking, but they even
making the world, let's say more bad by allowed the
cartels and the direct trafficker to use their infrastructure to
transfer money.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
I really haven't come across any evidence that the members
of the Supercartel are connected to Iran for ideological reasons.
It's likely it was just business, the money laundering. It
was a service, one that worked, but having access to
new and sophisticated ways to move money, it made the
rise of stateless drug traffickers like the Supercartel possible. And
(32:20):
this connection could it be the thing that explains how
the supercartel got involved in the assassination of Alimatamed Udi
says the Alimatomed assassination it fits with a pattern he's
seen of Iran using organized criminals to target their enemies abroad.
Speaker 9 (32:38):
I think Iran is not alone. I think today is
a new trend by some let's say intelligence forces, that
it's easier, sometimes cheaper to use drag dealers and criminals
to make assassination because if they call, you cannot blame Iran,
(33:01):
you can blame drug trafficking. It's something that related to
drug trafficking. They are preferred to go to criminal and
to drug dealers, to pay them money, to give them
guidance and to send them to the mission.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
But I still have a big question. Is it possible
to find out who in Iran worked with the supercarteil
to assassinate Alimtomed to solve this murder?
Speaker 9 (33:26):
Yes, but it will be a little bit difficult because
they're not stupid. In most of the cases, they're putting
a buffer between themselves and the last end. Let's say
something like that. Let's say the Iranian from Good Sports
Agent well will approach to someone that it will approach
(33:46):
to somebody else, and then it will approach to the
third party and will give him the mission.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
To find someone buried deep in a shadowy, hidden world
where espionage and organized crime me it seems impossible, And
then I came across a case a top Iranian spy
arrested in Europe, found with a red notebook full of secrets,
and perhaps inside that notebook we can find the answer.
(34:13):
That's next time on our season finale of Hot Money.
Hot Money is a production of The Financial Times and
(34:33):
Pushkin Industries. It was written and reported by me Miles Johnson,
and if you've got any leads or information about this story,
you can email me at New narcosat FT dot com.
The series producer is Peggy Sutton. Edith Russello is the
associate producer. Fact checking is by Arthur Gompertz, Engineering by
Sarah Bruguerer, sound design from Jake Gorsky, Jeremy Warmsley wrote
(34:58):
the original music. Our editor is Sarah Nix, and the
executive producers are Jacob Goldstein and Cheryl Brumley. Special thanks
to Laura Clark, Alistair Mackie and Breen Turner do
Pushkin Just a quick note before we start today's show.
You can listen to Hot Money the New Narcos ad
free by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. Find Pushkin Plus
on the Hot Money Show page in Apple Podcasts or
at pushkin dot fm, slash Plus. With your subscription, you'll
(00:36):
also get access to ad free binge opportunities from Malcolm
Gladwell's revisionist History, The Happiness Lab from Doctor Lori Santos,
and tons of other top shows in the Pushkin Network.
Sign up in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm,
slash Plus.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Previously on Hot Money, US undercover agents made a connection
between money launderers working for European drug traffickers and top
level officials in Iran. It was part of a ski
to help the regime evade American sanctions and source heavy weapons.
This time, a whole new money laundering operation comes into view,
(01:20):
invented by the man at the top of the Dubai Supercartel,
Daniel Kinahan. Back in episode four, we left him living
a life of luxury in Dubai. He just got married
and business was booming as the supercartel joined forces to
grow their trafficking operations. Across Europe and Daniel his new
(01:40):
career as a boxing manager. It was about to take off.
Remember back in Spain, he helped open a gym called
MTK and signed up and coming boxers from Ireland. In
the UK, he set them up in nice villas and
hired the best trainers and arranged their fights. Unlike his father,
Daniel appeared to like being a public figure to revel
in the attention he got. He was living a dual life,
(02:04):
enjoying the status of a top drug trafficker and the
image of a high flying boxing promoter. It seemed to
me that he thought boxing was his path to being
accepted as a legitimate businessman, but something inside him meant
he just couldn't leave the world of crime behind. Now
it's twenty twenty, Daniel kinahans in Dubai and he's taken
(02:25):
his boxing promotion business there with him. He's working on
the biggest boxing deal of his life and if he
pulls it off, it will catapult him to the very
top of the sport.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
Hello there, I'm just after getting off the phone with
Daniel Kinahan.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
That's world famous heavyweight champion Tyson Fury. He's a fast
talking shaven headed nineteen stone Man Mountain and on that
afternoon he's even more excitable than usual. He posts on
social media, He's just informed.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
Me that the biggest fight in Bridges boxing history has
just been agreed.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
Gear that my boy.
Speaker 5 (03:03):
Big shout out done.
Speaker 6 (03:04):
He got this done.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Two fight deal Tyson Fury versus Anthony josh next year.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
The announcement it stuns the world of boxing. After winning
a world heavyweight title five years earlier, Fury's career it's
been in a slump, but since meeting Daniel Kinahan, he's
made an epic comeback. He's beaten the previously undefeated and
reigning WBC champion Deonte Wilder in this huge Las Vegas showdown,
(03:33):
and that means Fury's upcoming bout against fellow British heavyweight
Anthony Joshua. It's immediately billed as one of the biggest
fights in the history of the sport. It's going to
be an international extravaganza broadcast across the world. Pay per
view sales and sponsorship are going to generate hundreds of
millions of dollars and Fury he's crediting Daniel Kinahan with
(03:54):
pulling the whole thing together, and Daniel's not only organizing
these box office prize fights, He's also started to rub
shoulders with Royalty. Around the same time that Fury's fights announced,
Daniels signed up as a special advisor on combat sports
by a company belonging to the Prince of Bahrain. The
press release describes him as an international boxing powerbroker. And
(04:16):
shortly before that, Daniel shows up with a charity gala
in Kazakhstan wearing a tuxedo and sitting next to him
is none other than Bob Aarum, one of the most
influential figures in boxing history.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
Aram.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
He's promoted Muhammad Ali and he's an inductee into the
Boxing Hall of Fame.
Speaker 5 (04:34):
We have great confidence in Kenahan. We think he's very very,
very honest, very astute. He has great connections.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
And now he's singing the praises of Daniel Kinahan.
Speaker 5 (04:47):
You know, I like to deal with guys, no nonsense,
people whose word is their bond, and that's what it's
been with Daniel.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
But just as Daniel Kinahan's reputation as a boxing magnate
starts to soar, some people are starting to look more
closely at the source of his fortune. I'm Miles Johnson
and from the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries. This is
Hot Money, season two, the New Narcos, episode seven, Against
(05:23):
the Ropes. The thing that first pulled me into this
(05:46):
story was when a source told me, if you really
want to understand the exploding European cocaine trade, you need
to take a close look at a murder in a
small Dutch town. And that led me to an Amsterdam
murder broker, a Dublin safehouse, the Kinnahans, and then the
Iranian government. For a while, the way this connection worked,
(06:07):
it just wasn't clear, and then we found something. The
thing that links these unlikely characters together is the mechanics
of sanctions of Asian and money laundering. But if anyone
can help me really understand how all of this works,
it's a guy called Quentin mug.
Speaker 7 (06:25):
I'm a French police commander. I am currently working in
the EUROPEOL which he's the European agency for criminal police.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
I first met Quentin after other police contacts told me
that he was one of the best in the world
at complex money laundering cases. He's got dark, floppy hair,
a stubbly beard, and he talks with the unassuming calmness
of a gallic colombo. He doesn't miss a trick if
you're trying to launder your drugs money in a shipman
of seafood. He's the sort of guy who'll swivel around
(06:57):
at the last minute and say just one more thing.
Speaker 7 (07:01):
You know, instinct kicks in. You tell me is that
you imported a hundred thousand euros worth of shrimps. But
what shrimp was at a frozen shrimp big streams? But
I guess cash scrips? Then what was exactly in the continue?
You don't know. That's that's how it.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
Works, Quentin. He lives and breathes this sort of stuff,
and he's actually written a book about it. It's called
gen Salle or Dirty Money.
Speaker 7 (07:25):
So I started to pick up on these aspects of
the job because essentially everybody wakes up for money, including
the criminals, and I really started to enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
Quentin actually worked on part of the DEA's investigation into
Iman Kobesi and ended up arresting a French associate of hers.
He says there's one important reason why drug traffickers might
end up working with someone like Kobesi. Criminals and sanctioned governments.
They've got a problem in common. They can't just freely
move money around the international banking system, so both need
(07:57):
to find more creative methods, methods that law enforcement agencies
can't track.
Speaker 7 (08:02):
And that is the beauty of it, to be honest,
because basically this appeal for and a NIMI is something
that the wood underworld has in common.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
As a cocaine market in Europe has boomed, massive amounts
of dirty cash are started to pile up and to
make their businesses work to pay suppliers in Latin America,
pay henchmen, or buy a mansion in Dubai. The car
tells they need to keep that money from getting stuck.
It's a critical logistical headache of being a drug trafficker
but moving billions secretly around the world. It's actually quite hard.
(08:38):
Imagine a drug trafficker has say ten million dollars in
the Netherlands and.
Speaker 7 (08:42):
You would like that to be in Dubai. So now
he's got a number of options. You could move it himself,
as that's been setting some cash careers, taking zerisk of
being spudied at the airport. He could try to transform
it into something else, maybe jewelry, wa cheese, whatever. But
again you need to transport it. You could try to
(09:02):
hide these tracks by converting that money into other goods
such as cars, and then ship them away, get the
cars somewhere in another country, sell them, justify the profit
and take it away. But then you need companies, you
need important But it's complete lydy. Oh, you can just
pick up your phone.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
Pick up your phone and call a money broker. They're
specialists to operate in a huge underground banking system and
it's critical infrastructure for the underworld.
Speaker 7 (09:29):
So I would simply contact the money brokers. The money
broker would send me a money collector. That money collector
will come to me, usually with a banknote.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
It's pretty hard to feel comfortable handing over massive suitcases
of cash to a stranger, so they've come up with
a sort of verification system. The person picking up the
cash they have to show a serial number of a
specific banknote to prove their identity.
Speaker 7 (09:55):
And it was in two three days, I would have
an equivalent talment of money in the country I want.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
So it's sort of like a secret currency exchange service,
but for major criminals. But the concept that took me
a little while to get my head around is that
the actual physical cash it doesn't ever move. It stays
in the same place. The networks have supplies of cash
in different countries, in places like warehouses, and instead of
(10:23):
moving it, they simply pay you out from the supply
they have in the place you need it, minus a commission.
Of course, this works because people doing the reverse trade
to you, customers moving money in the other direction, they
will replenish the supply of cash from where you collected
it at one of the networks to facto offices around
the world.
Speaker 7 (10:41):
The most basic often comes in the form of a
little shop grocery stores that opens late and so very
expensive apples, and then everybody goes. But how is it
possible that it is still open where.
Speaker 6 (10:59):
There's a lot of that.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Before I'd heard about this, I'd assumed that modern money
laundering was high tech, using things like cryptocurrencies or complex
financial instruments. Actually really surprised to learn that it's pretty
old school. Quentin says that this modern shadow banking system,
it's similar to the principles of hawala networks that were
used by Eastern traders from the fourteenth century.
Speaker 7 (11:21):
So the Hawala system is basically a very ancient system
that consisting is based on trust and it's based on
a network of Hawala dhas before running this kind of
informal network. It was used a long time ago, even
in the Middle Aged when you were traveling, you didn't
want to, you know, wander around the roads with golden use.
(11:42):
So what you would do you would make a deposits
in the merchant who has an agreement with his suppliers.
Let's say I don't know it's the Middle East, and
then when you would arrive there, you would choose a
note and somebody would give you an equivalent amount of
money based on trust.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
I'm also just interested in the capacity of his systems
because we're talking hundreds of millions of not billions potentially
of money. The liquidity that deep that you can move
that much money through this.
Speaker 7 (12:13):
Start it's going to be a short term swer it yes, wow,
it is.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
So there are billions of dollars circulating through these black
market brokers, and it's not just drug barons who are
using them. There are tax evaders, human traffickers, warlords, terrorist groups,
and people moving money for sanctioned governments. There's this strange
thing in Europe and it's that the number of physical
banknotes in circulation over the last decade, it's actually gone up,
(12:43):
but the number of people paying for stuff with cash,
it's gone down. And central banks they can have a
pretty hard time knowing where all of that physical cash
has gone. In the UK alone, the Bank of England,
it believes that there's about fifty billion pounds in cash
in circulation, but it just can't be accounted for. No
one knows where it is. And meanwhile, Quentin's seeing signs
(13:07):
that the number of money brokers is going on.
Speaker 7 (13:10):
I've seen the commission drop. It's not a good sign
because they're asking for less and less money. Zans that
there are more and more competitors and there is more
and more money out there.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
Like Quentin said at the start, everybody in the world
a crime. They wake up for money. And over in
the United States, one lawyer is starting to dig deeper
into the Kinahan money machine.
Speaker 4 (13:33):
In the Middle East, Daniel Kinahan is living in Dubai.
They're having a party in Dubai. They're getting away with,
(13:53):
you know, a lot of stuff. It seems to be
in Dubai and he felt, I think untouchable.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Eric Montalvo is an attorney in Washington, DC and before
getting into law, he served for twenty one years as
an active duty marine in the US military in the
First Golf War in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
Speaker 4 (14:11):
When I transitioned into the civilian community, I eventually started
my firm in twenty eleven and I practice national international law.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
And then one day in twenty twenty, Eric got a
call from a boxing promoter who was furious one of
the promoters most successful fighters was leaving. He'd switch to
another promotion company, one called MTK. It's the company that
Daniel Kinahan co founded back in Spain, and by twenty
twenty one, MTK Global, like Daniel, is based in Dubai.
(14:44):
MTK has become a major player in the boxing world
and this fighter he wants to move over to them,
but he's still under contract, so there's a dispute, and
the current promoter asked Eric to take on his case.
Speaker 4 (14:57):
Before this, I was not really a boxing litigator, if
you will, like the boxing profession was not something that
I was intimately familiar with in terms of the business side. Right,
you know, I'm a fan and I would watch a fight,
you know what have you, But I really had never
got from a litigation standpoint into the back end of
(15:17):
what was going on, so I really was in a
learning curve on this.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
Eric's not studying the contracts, and MTK looks just like
any other multinational company.
Speaker 4 (15:27):
On its face, it looked very legitimate and very powerful
compared to even any US company. No one could really
compete with them, and they had endorsements from high level
boxing professionals, right Bob aram So my first review of
them was that they were a big professional boxing corporation
(15:47):
international and that I just had to hold them accountable
for contract issues.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
But then Eric comes across the name Daniel Kinahan. At
the time, back in twenty twenty one, most of the
boxing world had embraced Kinahan as a legitimate businessman, Eric's
or something else.
Speaker 4 (16:06):
When I focused in on him, obviously, I'm a former prosecutor,
so you know that got my eyebrows raised.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
Now, there's a long history in boxing of people with
let's say, a colorful past, and initially Eric thought that
the rumors around Daniel Kinahan would have no bearing on
the contractual dispute. But as Eric started to look at
MTK's business model, it seemed strange. One of the ways
that the company was able to recruit so many fighters
to its roster was by offering them hugely favorable terms,
(16:40):
terms that seemed to defy financial logic.
Speaker 4 (16:43):
When I started trying to understand the financials of what
was happening, nothing made sense. No business can spend the
amount of money in litigation, you know, fighter bonuses, all
of these things when that money is not coming from fights.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
For example, you could have a situation where a boxer makes,
say five hundred thousand dollars in a fire, but the
boxing company promoting them pays them seven hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 4 (17:14):
Where's that money coming from.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
Daniel Kinahan had officially parted ways with MTK back in
twenty seventeen. His links to organized crime had made it
difficult to be the public face of the company.
Speaker 4 (17:25):
Everyone's paying attention to you, probably for a good reason,
so you know, take a back seat and you're no
longer part of MTK. The problem is is that mister
Kinahan wasn't able to do that. He either loved the
boxing game, loved the limelight whatever it was, but he
could not help himself, and so he was publicly coming
out over and over again and participating in the fighting arena.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
And as Eric digs deeper into MTK's finances, he discovers
that the company seems to have found an innovative way
of moving money around the globe.
Speaker 4 (17:59):
It became clear to me as a prosecutor that what
they were doing is they were using the fighters as
a way to move money through the system. And so preliminarily,
what I see is that let's say they put a
million dollars in the fighter's account that wasn't for the
fighter to keep. What it was was they would then
(18:21):
take that money out a month or two later, and
then it would go to a property or go to
some other venture from the fighter's account. And these were
typically new accounts, so the fighter would set up a
new account, there would be a very significant amount of
money coming in to the account, and then that money
(18:43):
would leave shortly thereafter, and you go to pay for
some other thing that's unrelated to the fighter or anything else.
So that is money laundering.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
Let's stop here for a moment, because what Eric claims
is happening using boxing to launder money. It's a pretty
serious allegation. Up until now, most people have seen Daniel
Kinahan's rise in boxing as an attempt to clean up
his reputation. But maybe, if Eric's right, it was more
than that. The boxing and the crime, they weren't two
(19:21):
different worlds, they were part of the same thing. Eric's
next move is to file a legal case in California
for his client. It says MTK is quote overseen by
mister Daniel Kinahan, and that Kinnahan started MTK to quote
laun the ill gotten gains from drug trafficking. It was
part of a civil claim seeking compensation from MTK. MTK
(19:45):
responds it strongly denies what it called wild allegations, and
it says MTK Global is not a front for a
European drug cartel, does not engage in money laundering, and
does not make money from the sale of illicit drugs.
It also denied having any ongoing ties to Daniel Kinahan.
We should also be clear that there's no suggestion that
(20:08):
the boxers associated with MTK were involved in any criminal activity.
At the time Eric's theory, it wasn't a popular one.
Speaker 4 (20:19):
Most of the people that were around me that knew
what I was doing thought I was a little bit
of a crackpot, right like you know, what are you
talking about. Like, first of all, MTK's legitimate, you know organization.
I mean, people were saying as Bob Aaron was saying it,
the California Commissioner was saying it. Everybody was like, you know,
this Montavo guy is crazy and all of the stuff.
Speaker 8 (20:40):
You're going up in this instance against people who at.
Speaker 5 (20:45):
The time.
Speaker 8 (20:47):
Are seen as extremely dangerous, you know, like some of
the most dangerous criminals in the whole world, people who
are linked to multiple, multiple homicides. And I was just
wondering what you were sort of thinking at the time
about that part of it.
Speaker 4 (21:02):
I mean, in terms of my own personal safety or.
Speaker 8 (21:05):
In terms of your own personal safety.
Speaker 4 (21:07):
Maybe I'm not, you know, the most normal person in
the world, but I mean, you know, I went to
war at twenty right, I'm not gonna not do what
I have to do because I'm afraid that's somehow shape
or form, someone's gonna want me dead because I'm complaining
about what they're doing.
Speaker 9 (21:27):
You know.
Speaker 4 (21:27):
I just if that's the case, I shouldn't be an
attorney right.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
To start the US legal case against Kinahan. They're going
to have to find him so they can serve him
the papers and finding a man who's been busy evading
law enforcement agencies for years. It might sound a bit tricky,
but Eric had a plan.
Speaker 4 (21:44):
When you're trying to be a legitimate businessman, you have
to register your business, and so in Dubai it's no
different right they expect you to file the proper documents,
et cetera. So once I saw he was in Dubai,
I focused my efforts there. And if you look at
Palm Islands, right, there's two of them.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
They're two man made islands jutting out from the coast
of both engineered in the shape of palm trees so
that each luxury property has its own waterfront.
Speaker 4 (22:15):
And if you have the amount of money that you
know mister Kinahan has access to, and you know the
pictures and everything else you see, it made sense that
he was likely living on one of those islands.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
So Eric he'd figured out where Daniel Kinahan was living
in Dubai, and he'd hired someone to go and deliver
the US court papers to his address. Now, the next
question was how would Daniel respond. So Daniel's figuring out
(23:01):
how to deal with this legal case against him, and
at the same time there are now signs that Dubai,
once a paradise for your criminals, has begun to crack down.
The first members of the supercartel are starting to fall.
Ridu Antargi one of the guests at Daniel Kinahan's wedding
and a notorious Dutch cocaine boss. He's arrested in Dubai
(23:23):
and charged with multiple murders, and the Emirate agrees to
send him back to the Netherlands to face trial. Another
wedding guest, the Chilean traffick are known as El Rico.
He's arrested in Latin America and extracited to the Netherlands.
Two Daniel Kinahan's still safe in Dubai, but the pressure
back in Ireland is starting to build. There's outrage in
(23:44):
the Irish Parliament. The day after Tyson Fury posts about
Kinahan arranging the Joshua fight. Leova redcar Ireland's TISUK, the
Prime Minister. He says he's taken aback by Kinahan's involvement,
citing his checkered past. He asks Iland's Foreign ministry to
talk to the UAE government about it urgently. Days later,
the Prince of Barren dumps Kinahan as an advisor, and
(24:07):
Bob Aarum announces that he's going to have or Tyson
furious negotiations from now on, not Daniel Kinahan. Daniel's now
on the back foot, and he makes a kind of
surprising decision. He launches a public relations campaign to save
his reputation as a legitimate businessman. A bizarre film appears
on the Internet called The Regency Discover the Truth.
Speaker 6 (24:30):
And this isn't some.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Cobbled together home video. It's a professional project. It's a
dramatic reenactment of the assassination attempt against Daniel in twenty
sixteen in Dublin. It features a handsome actor playing him,
who's portrayed as the victim in the whole thing.
Speaker 4 (24:47):
When Daniel Kinahan arrived at the Wayne.
Speaker 3 (24:49):
For Clash of the Clans, the first thing that he
noticed was that there were no Gada to police the event.
This was unnerving because Daniel was used to having his
every move shadowed by police.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
Not only that, it's unlikely the film convinced anyone, but
it showed that Daniel Kinahan was starting to get nervous.
Back in Dublin, John O'Driscoll, the man in charge of
Island's response to the Kinahan's wave of violence. He's been
watching Daniels rise in boxing with frustration.
Speaker 6 (25:21):
The sport of boxing which is very important, and I
knew it to be so, having policed in inner city
communities for many years, many kids were diverted from crime
through an involvement in the sport of boxing, and here
we saw the Kinahan organization potentially destroying that sport. They
(25:42):
were corrupting the sport and that was operating at a
global level.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
John's been trying to come up with a plan, a
plan to take the Kinahans down. But even if they
build a bulletproof case, there's another problem. The Kinahans are
in Dubai, and Dubai has no formal extradition agreement with Ireland.
John he realizes something.
Speaker 6 (26:06):
That no one entity, no one law enforcement entity, could
ever achieve any realistic success on its own entackling one
of these criminal enterprises.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
So John starts flying around the world, meeting with other
law enforcement agencies, sharing information, discussing strategies. He knows that
back in twenty ten, police across Europe tried to stop
the kiinner Hans with Operation Shovel, but the case had
fallen apart, and John He's determined that will never happen again.
He needs a silver bullet. Then one morning he's talking
(26:42):
to a US official when they mentioned something that John
just hadn't thought about before. Something the US government has
used to go after people in countries like Russia, Iran,
and North Korea, countries in which Western governments can't just
go in and arrest people places like Dubai. What if
the official asked John, they put the Kiinner Hands under
(27:04):
economic sanctions the Irish police, they may not be able
to get close to the kin Hands in Dubai if
the US Treasury put them under sanctions, that would cut
them off from their money, the motive for being in
crime in the first place.
Speaker 6 (27:19):
From that day, it was part of our objective that
we would acquire sufficient information to provide to the US
Department of Treasury to encourage it to take on the
Kinnahans as a target, for them to be placed under
a list of priorities.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
It was just an idea, but it was a radical one,
a new tool to target individuals connected to European organized crime.
John immediately gets to work. He needs to bring in
as many international partners into the operation as possible, but
to convince the US Treasury to take action, the joint
operation needs watertight evidence that the Kinnahans have evolved into
(28:00):
a global threat.
Speaker 6 (28:02):
Throughout the process, I would have been privy to the
intelligence that we had gathered ourselves in Ireland, and then
other jurisdictions had gathered additional information, and bit by bit
dijigsaw was being put together in terms of establishing how
significant in fact the Kenahans were on the global stage.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Months and months passed, with countless meetings between law enforcement
agencies from different countries sharing the intelligence they've gathered on
the Kinnahans, and then the US side of the joint
operation they discovered something pretty big. At the time, it
was a closely guarded piece of highly sensitive information. John
tells me it was something about how the Kinahans and
(28:45):
other members of the Dubai supercartel had been laundering their money,
about the money brokers that we heard about earlier in
the episode.
Speaker 6 (28:52):
As time emerged and as the eyes of US law
enforcement more generally were focused on the Kenhen's, it was
realized that the money laundering associated with that drugs empire
involved the Kenahan's utilize organizations that may potentially have links
(29:13):
to international terrorism.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
As we're talking, as John's telling me this, I want
to know what he means which international terrorists? Is it
a group, is it a government? But when you say
terrorist related to activity, does that relate to any particular countries.
John doesn't really answer this, so I ask him directly
the thing I'm thinking, the thing you might be thinking too.
(29:36):
Is he talking about Iran.
Speaker 6 (29:38):
Well, that would be a conclusion that would be reached
primarily by the US authorities haven't been satisfied having received
initially information from the Irish law enforcement, UK law enforcement,
and they then pursuing that line of inquiry, would then
(30:00):
have concluded that, in fact, there is potential that there
is a financing of activity that can could be associations
with the Iranian station.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
John's saying it in a guarded way, but here's what
it sounds like to me. It's the money, the money laundering,
that's the connection between the Kinahans, the supercartel and Iran.
An Udi Levy, the former head of the Mossad's Economic
warfare unit, He says the same thing. He tells me
that Iran's money laundering channels are regularly used by criminal
(30:36):
networks across the world as well as other sanctioned governments.
Speaker 9 (30:40):
The sanction caused the Iranian to be very creative to
find I think today the number one in the world
out of circlements the sanction how to build very very
smart way to laundering money. They are giving a suggestion
(31:01):
to the Irusian and other countries and the North Korean
out to circlements the sanction, they became so expert they.
Speaker 4 (31:08):
Know very well how to do it.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
And as we know, it's not just sanctioned regimes that
need to find secret ways of moving money around the world.
Speaker 9 (31:16):
No, the direct trafficking need the ideas and their way
out to build infrastructure that nobody identify. So and they
run and have today, I think the best infrastructure in
the world to transfer money from one point to the
other and that nobody will have identified. So not only
(31:40):
that they are using the direct trafficking, but they even
making the world, let's say more bad by allowed the
cartels and the direct trafficker to use their infrastructure to
transfer money.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
I really haven't come across any evidence that the members
of the Supercartel are connected to Iran for ideological reasons.
It's likely it was just business, the money laundering. It
was a service, one that worked, but having access to
new and sophisticated ways to move money, it made the
rise of stateless drug traffickers like the Supercartel possible. And
(32:20):
this connection could it be the thing that explains how
the supercartel got involved in the assassination of Alimatamed Udi
says the Alimatomed assassination it fits with a pattern he's
seen of Iran using organized criminals to target their enemies abroad.
Speaker 9 (32:38):
I think Iran is not alone. I think today is
a new trend by some let's say intelligence forces, that
it's easier, sometimes cheaper to use drag dealers and criminals
to make assassination because if they call, you cannot blame Iran,
(33:01):
you can blame drug trafficking. It's something that related to
drug trafficking. They are preferred to go to criminal and
to drug dealers, to pay them money, to give them
guidance and to send them to the mission.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
But I still have a big question. Is it possible
to find out who in Iran worked with the supercarteil
to assassinate Alimtomed to solve this murder?
Speaker 9 (33:26):
Yes, but it will be a little bit difficult because
they're not stupid. In most of the cases, they're putting
a buffer between themselves and the last end. Let's say
something like that. Let's say the Iranian from Good Sports
Agent well will approach to someone that it will approach
(33:46):
to somebody else, and then it will approach to the
third party and will give him the mission.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
To find someone buried deep in a shadowy, hidden world
where espionage and organized crime me it seems impossible, And
then I came across a case a top Iranian spy
arrested in Europe, found with a red notebook full of secrets,
and perhaps inside that notebook we can find the answer.
(34:13):
That's next time on our season finale of Hot Money.
Hot Money is a production of The Financial Times and
(34:33):
Pushkin Industries. It was written and reported by me Miles Johnson,
and if you've got any leads or information about this story,
you can email me at New narcosat FT dot com.
The series producer is Peggy Sutton. Edith Russello is the
associate producer. Fact checking is by Arthur Gompertz, Engineering by
Sarah Bruguerer, sound design from Jake Gorsky, Jeremy Warmsley wrote
(34:58):
the original music. Our editor is Sarah Nix, and the
executive producers are Jacob Goldstein and Cheryl Brumley. Special thanks
to Laura Clark, Alistair Mackie and Breen Turner do
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