How did the Kinahan organized crime group rise to the top of cocaine trafficking in Europe?

In this episode, Mark sits down with investigative journalist and author Nicola Tallant to discuss her book ‘Cocaine Cowboys: The Deadly Rise of Ireland's Drug Lords’.

At the end of the 90s, Ireland was booming, the ‘Celtic Tiger’ had risen. People had more money to spend on leisure activities, and on drugs.

In steps a man from a comfortable middle-class background in Ireland, the well-educated and well-mannered, Christopher Kinahan Snr, who alongside his two sons Daniel Kinahan and Christopher Jnr, created the Kinahan Cartel.

Along with the cocaine came money, extreme violence and assassinations. The most famous of these was the Hutch-Kinahan feud, which saw criminal groups fighting one another across Europe.

Eventually, the Kinahan Cartel would join with criminal organizations from across Europe to create what Europol called the ‘European Super Cartel’, controlling the distribution of cocaine across the continent.

In 2022, the Kinahan Cartel, alongside its leading members, were sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) over alleged links to a money laundering network run by Hezbollah.

Nicola Tallant has been reporting and investigating organized crime in Ireland for three decades. She has written several books about the topic and has a successful podcast called ‘Crime World’.

In this episode, Mark talks to Nicola about her new book ‘Cocaine Cowboys: The Deadly Rise of Ireland's Drug Lords’.

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Welcome to underworlds from the global initiative against transnational organized crime.

My name is Mark Shaw and in today's episode I'm speaking to Nicola Terrent.

And Nicola has written a book, Cocaine Cowboys, about the rise of organised crime in Ireland and its connection to cocaine trafficking.

It's packed with violence and a whole range of characters and it's a story I didn't really know too much about.

So we had a fascinating conversation over to our talk.

Nicola, it's so great to be speaking to this morning and I really enjoyed your book.

There's a copy of the COVID You tell this remarkable story of cocaine trafficking in Ireland, which I knew something about, but not the level of detail that the book covers.

Is it possible just at the beginning to sketch out the main developments for a more global audience who wouldn't necessarily know the ins and outs?

And why would Ireland be so vulnerable, in your view, to cocaine trafficking, but also the growth of organized crime, this really hardcore form of organized crime that the book shows?

Yeah, well, there's a lot of reasons for that, I suppose.

Let's talk, first of all, cocaine vulnerability of Ireland.

We're an island, so we're on the edge of Europe.

So that's our geography.

And I think then you have to look at the social history of the country as well.

Came out of a recession that was pretty bad in the eighties, into the nineties, when we started towards the end of the nineties, what we called our celtic tiger era, which was when the country got very, very rich very quickly, went a bit crazy with property, which caused problems then when the crash came.

But we sort of became a country where you had people who had been unemployed all of a sudden were working, they had money in their pocket as cocaine is becoming popular and were a nation who quite liked to go out and party.

So I think it was a bit of a perfect storm there.

You also had sort of a fallback from the days when there was a lot of tenement people living in tenements in the city center, when the government started building projects.

And probably like many countries, they built these vast housing estates with a promise of follow up education facilities and recreational facilities which never came.

So you had these huge areas of social housing which saw massive unemployment and that really sort of gave grounding then for a lot of these gangs that came up.

In more recent decades, drug dealing has become a career choice for a lot of these sort of disadvantaged youth that are in these estates.

I don't know, is that any different to anywhere else in Europe, really.

But that's the situation, sort of the overview of it.

You know, what's astonishing about the book, and I think, as you know, we're doing research in different parts of the world, and we're counting criminal assassinations.

So I would say violence generated by hoganized crime is a key issue for us.

Ireland is extraordinarily violent in relation to organized crime, perhaps not in its overall homicide rate.

And when you see a couple of prominent murders recently in the Netherlands over the past couple of years, a very big response in Europe.

But here in Ireland, you have this constant drumbeat of hits and assassinations related to the.

To the cocaine economy.

Why the violence?

I mean, outline one or two cases, if you wouldn't mind.

But it's kind of extraordinary for a western european country, I would argue.

Or perhaps it's not extraordinary, but it's a very marked feature of the book.

I think it's not extraordinary.

I think it's very well covered and reported here.

We have a huge appetite as a population for reporting on organized crime, and it's certainly a subject that's of huge interest.

So as a result, you see a lot of media reporting.

What we tend to get is outbursts of violence, feuds within groups.

By and large, over my work over the past 20 plus years, that has been fueled by cocaine, by the money in Ithood, by, in a lot of cases in more recent times, the youth of those that are involved in gangs, there's a breakdown of that old gangland code and rules, I suppose, and they immediately will turn to the gun.

There is no sort of mediation anymore.

They don't sit down and try and talk their way out of these routes.

They just immediately go to shoot one another.

You know, you see feuds.

In a lot of cases, these gangs, the more powerful they get, they almost implode rather than their police.

And the guardee here will try and dismantle these groupings, which is a huge, vast job that can take years of sort of relentless pursuit of the gangs through raids and surveillance.

But when that starts, you know, when.

When there's a focus put on a grouping that creates a paranoia within the grouping, there's questions about if there's somebody touting, is there somebody ratting?

And usually you'll see that paranoia take a grip.

And sometimes the gangs will nearly wipe one another out before law enforcement can.

There was initially, I think, there was two very large feuds that occurred at the beginning of the century, the beginning of the two thousands, one of them in Limerick on the west coast, a city with a very high crime rate despite its population, and the other in Dublin.

And both of those were essentially cocaine wars, and both of those resulted in the murder of about 20 people, which is a lot for given our population here in Ireland.

They were relentless feuds, and they sort of set the path for the gangs that were to come.

And obviously, in more recent times, the biggest and probably most reported feud, both in and outside the country, has been known as the Hutch Kinahan feud.

And that was the Kinahan organized crime group, which we might talk about in other ways as we chat.

And the organized crime groups would have had to pay up some tithe to them.

They often would have had to go to them for sanction if they wanted to do something.

And obviously, with the ceasefire and the dissident groups that have come up underneath them, we just don't believe in the ceasefire, are really disorganized.

They don't have that same militaristic power that the original IRA had.

That's fascinating, Nicolas.

And if I'm getting it right, this is because of the weakening paramilitary terrorist linked violence and the empowerment of organized crime figures through the sort of cocaine economies.

Would that be a reasonable summary of what you think occurred?

Yeah, there was very interesting detail in a trial which occurred last year.

Jerry the monk Hutch, who would be seen as the familial head of one side of that group.

In the Hodgkin feud, he was tried for murder.

He was actually found not guilty.

But the trial detailed some bugging that the police had done on a car, that he was brought north in the car, and he was brought to meet some dissident Republicans who were sort of essentially supposed to be getting in the middle of this and talking to Daniel Kinahan and making him step back and step down.

But you could clearly see that these dissidents were.

They were just a disorganized grouping, and they never got Daniel Cinehan to the table.

I mean, there was absolutely no way an individual as powerful as him was going to speak to them or that they held any sway whatsoever.

And you could kind of see the realization happening with the monk, who's a sort of a veteran who came up and lived in a much different.

In a very different time, when he would have worked very closely with the provost and shown, I suppose, respect to the provisional IRA and all the rest of it.

And you can see a dawn of realization for him, I think, that things have really changed.

So there was, you know, there's lots of other small incidents like that that you can see that pivot has happened.

Nicholas, is the pivot essentially means that organized crime provides its own violence, where previously you had to pay off or you hired people from established violence groups, which happened to be sort of paramilitary or the like.

This is basically the shift, would you say?

Well, the paramilitary groupings always basically tried to.

To take money from the.

Yeah, tax them, basically.

And they successfully did that for a long time.

And the last group in, which is called the real IRA, there's loads of these dissident groups that pop up and change names, and they're no longer organized structures.

There's kind of rows within the command.

They break up.

They, you know, they're.

And they come up with a new name.

I mean, there's so many of them.

There's the new INla.

The new new Inla, the new Ira.

But this group being called the new IRA was probably the last of those that was attempting to tax the drug gangs in Dublin.

And the head of the real Ira was a guy called Alan Ryan.

And he did run a pretty violent grouping, and they did manage to extract money off quite a few gangs.

But then in particular, one or two groupings went up against them.

And there was a moment of, you know, was this going to be.

Was his death going to be avenged in such a way that we've never seen violence like it, but it wasn't.

And that particularly set the.

I suppose it just showed how things had changed, that the drug gangs had gone up against the dissidents.

They had, you know, had murdered them, and the dissidents didn't have the power to fight back.

So it's just an evolving thing, as organized crime always is, I suppose, in Ireland, while we have those sort of vast swathes of disadvantaged youth there that are easily groomed into these gangs, there's also a large population of sort of unemployed dissidents that are very eager to get a job as such.

So they're available as enforcers.

They do work.

Sometimes they'll work as drug debt collectors.

They will sometimes get freelance work as hitmen.

And they're there in the ether as well.

And perhaps that makes us slightly unique to other countries.

A lot of them, the dissidents now, are sort of just born in the wrong era.

They would have liked to have been part of the war here, but they were just born too late.

So they've gone for a career that's pretty much gone.

It's in the past.

So they have to sort of find areas for themselves to make money.

Now, of course, the paramilitary, the provisional IRA and the dissidents would absolutely deny that they tax drug dealers.

They claim that they're there to community police and to sort of force the drug dealers out of the communities.

But I mean, that ship is saying, I don't think anybody believes that anymore.

Fascinating.

Honestly, Nicola, it, I mean, clearly has a set of fairly unique features, obviously related to Ireland's history.

Tell us about the Kinohan organized crime group.

Of course, there's coverage.

There were these very funny stories, I think, in the New York Times about doing, I'm south african, as you know, restaurant reviews in different places around the world.

But this is a really powerful criminal organization.

How did it develop?

Sort of.

Who are the key players?

The linkage to Dubai, for lots of reasons, is interesting.

Some background, if you wouldn't mind.

So the Kennedy organization would be seen as being one of the most powerful organized crime gangs in the world.

The Kinahan organization were sanctioned by the US treasury.

You know, you've got to be pretty much up there in the top to be sanctioned by the US treasury.

And the reason the US got involved is because there's a belief that they are ultimately funding Hezbollah and working with terrorist organizations.

They emerged and started in Dublin.

And Christy Kinahan senior is the head of that organization.

He's a very unusual character to be involved in organized crime at all because he came from a middle class background.

He would have had opportunities in life.

He was very clever, very academic, and the family worked and he was loved, you know, that you don't see in the background there those traditional reasons that people choose a path into organized crime, and especially in his era, because a lot of his contemporaries would have gone into organized crime.

Ultimately, the start of their journey would have been because they might have been actually hungry, you know, when they went out to steal.

And that emerged and evolved, and a lot of them would be sort of anarchists nearly against the state.

And that in most people involved in organized crime comes from probably generations of poverty and disadvantage.

But in his case, he was none of that.

And he started out as a fence here in Dublin.

He had very middle class manners and accent, and he was able to shift stolen goods into the legitimate economy for some of the more working class groupings.

There's a story that he became a heroin addict, which I always question, but nonetheless, that is in the ether.

He certainly saw an opportunity to get into heroin trading in the eighties when the kind of the big kingpin was taken down.

A man called Larry Dunn, and he is in the eighties, the late eighties.

He's caught in an apartment in Dublin with 200 grams worth of heroin, which is a lot of the time.

But also he's with a well known lebanese criminal.

And that shows, I think, his ambition.

He wasn't going to be a street dealer.

He wasn't going to remain in Ireland.

He was already making connections into Europe.

His ambition was to become a wholesaler to Ireland.

And he went to jail, got out, and headed straight to Amsterdam, where he, along with another business partner who he'd met in jail, basically did that.

They set themselves up as wholesalers.

And he mixes and mingles with some of the most important criminals and suppliers in the Netherlands.

In Amsterdam, the drug supermarket, he learns languages.

He has very sophisticated manners.

He sort of becomes this, albeit legitimate, businessman, except he's dealing in drugs and weapons.

And he's two sons who are living in a very working class part of Dublin.

They have been building up a sort of a grouping around them.

And he brings them into his world and, you know, they go up the ladder and become bosses of this organization, essentially, and silver spooned it.

But they bring with them some guys from Dublin, some childhood friends, some other groupings.

There's a river that divides Dublin called the Liffey, and there's traditional sort of rivalry between the south side and the north side, which is utterly ridiculous, but that's the way it goes.

But they bring together groupings from both sides of that divide and they head to Spain, where they start developing again, this massive wholesaling.

They get business in the UK around Spain, and they just grow and grow.

The Kinnahan organisation has recognized how big it is.

The Spanish describe it as the irish mafia and on the Costa del Sol, and there's a big operation across a number of continents, sorry, a number of territories to take them down.

There's arrests, there's seizures.

They're described as being an organization valued at about 100 million at that stage.

But very quickly, because of a number of reasons, the failure of Operation Shovel, probably the sort of lack of trust that still exists within the european police forces to share intelligence.

And I think the spanish system, which isn't robust enough, I think, to take down a lot of these groups, it fails dramatically.

And the Kinahan top tier, who have constantly told everyone, we'll beat this, we'll be back, we'll be bigger than ever, does exactly that.

And that empowers them even more.

You know, they're seen as a grouping who can beat the state.

And they continue to grow on the cost of Daniel Kinahan, the son of Christy Cinahan senior, sort of takes over as the boss, and he is even more ambitious than his father before him.

He reaches out to groupings from the Netherlands, from the Balkans, from Italy, and he sort of begins to create what has become known now as the european supercartel.

They want to control the price and the import of cocaine into Europe, which, of course, is this massive growing market.

Like Ireland, Europe is becoming richer all the time.

People have more money.

Cocaine is becoming more acceptable.

You can see it anywhere you go.

People in clubs here would often take cocaine off the back of their hand quite openly.

There's no shame associated with taking cocaine.

It still has that very cool image.

And the Kinahan organization become wealthier, I think, than probably they could even have considered themselves.

Certainly when they were sanctioned by the US treasury, they were valuing them at a billion, you know, and describing them as a murderous cartel.

And of course, that feud broke out because the Kinahan organisation, as it was the original irish Kinahan organisation, imploded.

Two sides divided, and one of them went for the head of the snake and tried to murder Daniel Kinahan at a boxing event here, failed.

And what resulted was this absolute sort of, you know, overkill in order to reestablish that power.

That's an excellent overview of the story.

Talk about Dubai, because Dubai is where they end up.

Of course, there are other european criminals in Dubai.

I mean, have the irish state attempted to get them back?

What's the story around Dubai?

The politics, the discussion in Dublin or Ireland more generally?

So Dubai is the new cossil crime, isn't it?

I mean, everybody from all over the world, Australians, South Africans, they're all there.

Every country in the world is looking for somebody, a major criminal, head back from Dubai.

They basically are there.

They're operating, they're directing their, you know, their movement of cocaine, their movement of guns.

They appear to be somewhat operating with impunity.

I don't know a huge amount the reasons for that.

But I do know that Dubai is still quite a new country, that it is very interested in wealth.

It appears to turn a blind eye to where that wealth is coming from.

It certainly appears to offer sanction to criminal organizations and to sort of, you know, on the run, essentially crime bosses who are coming with their billions but without much of a reputation.

Some of them are there actually on the run and want it.

And we've seen Dubai hand back some of those individuals, including Raphael Imperiale to Italy, rido and Taghi to the Netherlands.

We have been seeking Daniel Kinnahan for quite some time.

There's currently a file with our director of Public Prosecutions here.

He is suspected of murder and directing criminal organization.

The process to get him back appears to be very complex, very political.

We had two members of our guard as drug and an organized crime bureau based in Dubai for six months, sort of laying the groundwork for this to happen.

Our guarded chief, Drew Harris, has traveled to Dubai and he has created content with Dubai police, very high end video content for their social media.

Dubai is always trying to, or the emirates, rather, is always trying to claim that, you know, it's not a sanctuary for criminals.

But I.

Sometimes it's hard to see that it isn't when you see the amount of groupings that are based there.

And, you know, from a basic point of view, I think the Emirates just like the money, and they're happy to turn a blind eye.

I think they will.

Whoever it is, be it Daniel Kinnahan or anyone else, from the time comes, they will wipe them.

I think they will hand them back.

There's nobody going to be given sanctuary over maybe massive international efforts that could result in particularly bad publicity for them.

But I think up until that point, they're quite happy to see the money slosh around on their economy, and it's as simple as that.

And it's about 20 years that criminals have started going to Dubai and seeing it as a place to hide.

Talk about the state's response as I read the book, I may be wrong.

You're complimentary of some things that the police have done, and then you have some critique around some of the responses.

What's your sort of assessment of how the irish state more generally has responded to the issue of organized crime as the number of killings they frame tapped as cocaine users ramped up?

Is there any sense, for example, that money from the cocaine trade has infiltrated politics in Ireland?

I don't know if it's totally infiltrated politics as of yet.

It's certainly been seen to have infiltrated some policing corruption.

The big hacks in Europe, the anchor chart and SkyCG really showed how, you know, drug gangs and organized crime groups see corruption as part of their business.

Certainly there have been some officers before the courts who have been found to be giving information to organized crime groups.

That's how they work.

I think the warnings coming from Europol are certainly that.

You know, you need to be really aware of this.

Every country does, and on top of it, and, you know, has it made its way into the political system yet?

I'm not really sure that that is the case.

I think you have to look at organized crime groups as a business entity, and they will have.

I mean, they do operate like any corporate business, and while they don't have maybe offices and departments, they kind of do as well.

I mean, they certainly.

A lot of organized crime groupings will have a PR wing and, you know, media relations, people who reach out to journalists.

I found this quite fascinating when I sort of opened my eyes to it.

And they will have people out there looking for those to corrupt, whatever you'd call that department, I don't know.

In Antwerp recently, a case came before the court.

So then organized crime group, who are purely existing in order to identify corruptible individuals in the courts, in the media, in local authorities.

They had files on people that hadn't yet been approached.

They were able to establish an individual.

Let's take a court worker, for example.

What's their mortgage like?

Have they got any, you know, habits like gambling or cocaine use themselves that could put pressure on their finances?

How corruptible are they?

Because, of course, it's easier to corrupt somebody who's open to it than somebody who has to be forced into it.

You know, it'd be a pain in the ass to have to keep threatening somebody when you'd have somebody who'd be willing to take the money and do that.

So those kind of groupings do existential.

There was an incident here, which I found very concerning, that an individual was discovered to be working within the sort of the General Revenue service with links to an organized crime group.

And, of course, if you think about what revenue you have, they've everything on you, don't.

They know your dependents, they know your, you know, your status, they know your tax returns, they know your earnings.

They, you know, it's quite a lot of information that could come out of their.

So corruption is part and parcel crime, and certainly Ireland is no different anywhere else.

And people have their problems and their weaknesses, and, you know, we all work with a variety of individuals with all sorts of different issues going on in their lives.

So I think here as well as everywhere else, it's certainly something that police and politicians have to stay on top of.

But I don't know whether you want to talk about a bit of the media relations thing, because that's something I certainly find fascinating.

I dealt with it a little bit in my previous book, clash of the clans, which was based on the rise of the Kinahan organization.

There was actually an investigation into one site here in Ireland.

And because there appeared to be, you know, it was possible that this stuff could have been coming out of the guards.

But ultimately, it was discovered that it was directly coming from the Kinahan organization and that they were running quite a sophisticated media campaign.

And I personally had had some direct contact from people largely on these proton mails.

So encrypted communication where you don't know who you're dealing with or what their motive is.

And always when you're meeting or you're getting information from somebody within the criminal fraternity, for me, it's very important to look them in the eye for a start, to know who they are, to know where they're coming from.

Kind of get a vague idea of what their motive is, because, you know, if they're motivated just because they don't like the other bloke, maybe that's okay.

But if their motive is they are giving you information, incorrect or otherwise, in order to have somebody murdered, that's not okay.

And when you get info or you get contact through an encrypted system, you're losing all those senses, are you?

You're saying that and it became normal.

And you using yourself as a experienced journalists, people reach out to you.

You get a mail which is clearly coming.

So they've identified a set of journalists and they are planting a story or attempting to get better coverage or sort of sweeter coverage.

Is that more or less what.

Yeah, you have to.

Absolutely.

And you sort of have to really think, because you have to work out what it is they're looking to plant.

I mean, I know at one point in particular, and it was a very basic thing, but the Kinahan organization were looking to plant a seed that this feud will end once a named individual dies.

Why would they want to do that?

They want to show the public that there's a limit, but they want to achieve their objectives.

This is more or less the message they want to send.

I sort of think they were using graffiti localized for this, but they were also doing it through social media, and they were trying to plant that narrative into the mainstream media, which, of course, they will ultimately look down their nose on.

But I suppose if it's planted in the mainstream media, there's probably more of an element that those on the ground who they're trying to reach would believe it, maybe.

And I think what they were trying to do was they were trying to pop somebody close to him, to this individual, because he was under protection.

It was very difficult for them to get at him.

They had attempted a number of times to kill him.

And I think they were trying to plant a seed that if somebody just takes this guy out, this is the end of it.

And, and, you know, they were doing so.

And that's just one very, very small example of what they were doing.

Some of the stuff is way more complex, way more complex and very confusing.

And I've never come to the understanding of exactly what was going on.

But I think if you look at the Kinahan organization, you're looking at two very sort of odd characters, Christy Kinahan Senior and his son, Daniel Cinehan Junior.

And you mentioned at the beginning of the podcast that we've seen these restaurant reviews, and, of course, they have come up that Christy Kinahan senior was leaving restaurant reviews.

And, you know, the odd time while doing these reviews, he was capturing an image of himself in the, in a mirror of a hotel room or whatever.

I'd be very skeptical about that because my work has sort of taken me a little bit into the complex mind of Christy Clinton senior.

And I don't think anything happens by accident.

I think a lot of what he does, a lot of what he puts out is for a different reason.

Sometimes it's to legitimize himself within the international aviation world where he's tried to wash his reputation.

And sometimes it's maybe to leave a trail of crumbs for investigators that might lead them away from him.

And they were selling properties.

They were building this huge.

They had purchased a corner of Brazil and the brazilian Riviera, and they were building this huge, big hotel, country club complex, and there was all sorts of fancy brochures, etcetera, and this was to be the jewel in the crown.

If they could seize this, you know, through, you know, you're working with other countries, obviously, and trying to find ways that Europe can work with Brazil, etcetera.

But in the immediate aftermath of it, I had found a journalist in Brazil who could go down and have a look at this.

And, you know, the brochures would tell you that this is place was ready to sell, that there was, you know, building work, and the journalists went down and just found a dirt trunk.

I mean, there wasn't a foundation build, there was nothing.

And it was in an area which was property, was.

I mean, I think the brazilian economy is pretty chaotic and has been properties were really worth nothing as such.

But that detail that the investigators seized tied them up in knots for years as they tried to get land registry documents, etc.

From the brazilian authorities that ultimately didn't exist.

And that came out as shubble collapsed over the past few years that, you know, this did take a lot of time and effort.

And, yeah, I always wondered, was that caught out?

And I think, and I do believe it was.

And I also believe that the Kinahan organisation at the time had corrupted police officers in Spain.

They certainly had two on the payroll.

And I think that Europol did too much talking about what they were going to do, and they had held too many meetings and too many people were involved in the plans for those raids.

And I think that the Kinahans got time to leave what they wanted to leave.

And that's the kind of mind you're dealing with at the head of it.

And Daniel Kinahan as well, his son, we've seen him try to sportswash his reputation through boxing, almost do that.

You know, we've seen him tied in with Tyson Fury, world four world champion.

Get credit from Bob Aram in the US, the famous promoter.

We've seen him, people speak out about him.

And of course, Daniel Kinnan has no convictions, which he doesn't.

And he used that in that narrative that he was just simply a boy that done good from Dublin and he was just a very talented boxing promoter and could do business in the real world.

And I mean, it almost happened for him until what was named in those sanctions, those us treasury sanctions.

When I hear you talking about all of this, I mean, it's really, it's an amazing story.

Information, disinformation.

What's the role of journalism in all of this?

Serious question.

I mean, many of the people we interviewed are either former organized crime figures people, a couple of journalists, but what's the role of external actors in covering these issues?

Is it just, you know, this to fill the crime section of the bookshop?

You know, is there, is there a social role, you think, for the work you do?

Political role?

Well, I think it's very important.

I mean, I was only talking recently on my own podcast about.

So everywhere journalism is breaking down.

Obviously, the media is under pressure.

No media organizations making as much money as it was 20 years ago.

The digital element is taking a long time to catch up and it's coming and media will survive.

It's not a question of it.

It's going to be killed off.

But all the while, I think organizations across the world, you're seeing redundancies, you're seeing lack and lack of or less and less journalists, really.

And from a small point of view, the reason I was talking about it was because there was a very important court case that wasn't covered because I think because the journalists were on holidays and there was nobody to, you know, step in.

A lot of our courts, our regional courtrooms are only covered because a local gets up and goes down and does it and maybe doesn't sell stories one week and maybe does sell stories the next week.

A lot of these people are no longer on retainers that they used to be.

Some of the court cases aren't being covered.

And I think it's really, I think it's, it's actually very concerning.

There's been talk here about the media being buoyed up by government funding, which I think is probably going to be coming.

I think it's really, really important because the nuances, the small details that you'll see in my book and in other people's books form part of the tapestry of what creates organized crime and our understanding of it, because it's not just about a kid selling a couple of lines of coke on a street corner or, you know, people in nightclubs taking it.

There's this wide picture of what's happening, where that money for each deal is going, what it is creating all the way up from a deal today, anywhere in the world at any point in time, and somebody hands over 100 euro, follow that money and it goes to the very, very top of the tree where organized crime is mixing, mingling and working with terrorist organizations who are challenging the very existence of the west and, you know, funding wars.

So it's sort of without, I think, the journalism and the work that pulls together those threads and maybe gives ordinary people and understanding of it and those connections and the joining of those dots.

We could be living in a very naive world, like, where we just don't get it, you know, because, of course, as I always say, like, I mean, these guys aren't pushing drugs on an unwilling public.

They have a massive market, and it's the demand that's actually funding it.

They're not pumping cocaine into Europe that doesn't want to buy it.

And there is this disconnect between a particular middle class drug users who go out at the weekend who feel that, sure, everyone's doing it.

What difference is it going to make if I don't buy it and where that money ends up and the destruction it causes?

And a lot of those middle class drug users don't want Hezbollah to be funded by their money.

They don't want to see, you know, terror attacks happening.

They don't believe in the regimes of Russia or Iran.

But that's where some of that money is just going into.

So I think it's really important.

I think local court reporters are really important in that whole tapestry.

And it's kind of worrying where journalism is going.

Of course, then there's threats to crime, journalists, and, you know, it's not a job for everybody.

It's just not a job for everybody.

But plenty of people are still doing it and that, but those threats are coming back down the line from very bloody powerful organizations.

You know.

The one thing that really emerges from this book is just this vast array of characters, I mean, like whether they're sort of junior hitmen or more senior criminal figures that you've.

That you've already outlined.

What's with the sort of character nature of the narrative and having read a lot of these books basically for the podcast, but also, of course, just generally, I mean, is that because you had collected information on these individuals and then you sewed it into a bigger story?

Why?

Why that approach?

Do you think that's something that, that is specific to Ireland?

There's certain criminals that are almost a celebrity status.

Their names are known, they're household names.

And I don't know, is that unique to Ireland because our laws are quite strict.

I mean, you can really, you know, you need a conviction there.

You need a serious conviction in order to name somebody as a criminal.

Otherwise they're given a nickname or their grouping are given a nickname.

We have groups like, called the Gucci gang.

You know, there would be the.

The monkey gang is another crew, because when there was a raid done on their premises, there was a couple of monkeys found in cages, which I think were just for ornamental purposes.

But, you know, they get these monikers, these nicknames, but anyone who can be named, we usually in the media do name them.

And a lot of the individuals in that book would have been people who've come up again and again and again over the course of the decades who have been very significant organized crime figures and probably very stupid, because, you know, they're not.

They're not in the shadows.

There a lot of them.

I mean, there's one guy.

They all actually have these pretty cruel nicknames.

Any sort of physical problem you have is usually honed in on and usually by their own community, not the media.

But I.

There's one guy, fat Freddie Thompson.

And, like, you don't actually need to use a second name.

It's just fat Freddie everybody knows you're talking about.

And I actually always found it quite amusing that I knew when Daniel Kinnan had reached a particular stature that, you know, I might be on the national media hero or te or something, and they'd be just referring to him as Daniel.

He doesn't need a second name anymore.

So, yeah, we do connect with our criminal underworld in a way maybe other countries don't.

The UK and I worked there years ago.

I think they got slightly fed up of organized crime.

They had their craze and all those eras of the Richardsons and the Adams family.

And I was working in media at the time, and this sort of sea change came, the media, when they just became obsessed with celebrities, actual celebrities who didn't really do anything, maybe particularly interesting, but, you know, their love lives, their sex lives, everything just became the fodder and crime just moved further and further off the agenda.

Was that because there was no appetite there?

Or was it days that were pre.

You know, we're in newsrooms now, and we're literally looking at the trends on the walls and computer screens on the walls.

We can see exactly who's reading what, how long they're reading for, what stories are engaging with them.

But certainly there was decisions made in media back, I suppose I'm talking about the nineties.

And I think the UK is very complex.

There's a lot of different cultural gangs operating there.

It's huge, it's vast, and while definitely crime is covered, it just doesn't seem to have that same interest.

Or maybe there's.

Maybe things are changing again now, as I say to you with those statistics, because I go into our newsroom and I can just see who's reading what, and they're all reading about crime.

Yeah.

Interesting.

So our podcast wouldn't be complete without me asking you about sourcing.

Obviously not who you spoke to, speaking to, but you're speaking to the police, you're speaking to the underworld, you're going to court cases.

Are you triangulating all of that?

You've already mentioned this fascinating sense, which I think occurs in other countries, too, but may well be specific to some of the people you're dealing with, where criminal figures approach you.

And you've got to filter that out, give a sense of the sourcing on a book like this, I suppose.

A book like that.

I mean, I'm nearly 30 years working in this business, so I have built up, you know, trusted contacts over those years.

A trusted contact is somebody who, whose story proves maybe to be true again and again and again.

And that's how you kind of have to build that, both within the sort of the legitimate world plus the underworld.

So, of course, I will speak to.

Sometimes I'm quite fascinated myself with people who are speaking to me.

I just can't believe they're speaking to me.

And it sometimes can take years, or maybe with age, they mellow a bit and they kind of want to come and give information for whatever reason.

But it's fascinating.

It took me a long time to.

And of course, I approach people myself, you know, but it took me a long time to realize, because you'd always be a little bit wary of going to meet somebody.

And the best place to meet an underworld source is in an airport.

Of course, nobody can bring a gun through an airport, and it's quite.

It's just a safe place to go.

But it took me ages to realize the penny dropped eventually.

It's more dangerous for them than it is for me, actually, because, of course, while many things have changed, the overriding sense of a murder and that you never speak and you never tout and you never rat.

And it would be seen as that people talk, you know, criminals talking to journalists, while some might be sanctioned by their umbrella organizations, many aren't.

But yeah, it took me a while to realize how much danger they're putting themselves in in case they were seen or in case it was found out.

How much trust they're putting in me.

And why do they?

Is a question I guess I have my own answers to.

But why do they talk?

Okay, planting stories is one thing, but more generally, why do people in the criminal media talk?

I suppose ego is one reason.

And I.

Some of them kind of do like a little bit of publicity.

For whatever reason, they do things to say.

The newspaper I worked for, Sunday World, was very full of crime stories.

They used to call it the hello magazine of the criminal underworld.

Yeah.

Some of them just have a gripe with somebody or some sort of an underlying complaint that they have.

A lot of them have a complaint about the state and why don't the police go after the corrupt politicians and the bankers?

And sometimes when you listen to them.

They have a good perspective, they have.

Quite a good point.

Like in fairness, they do.

I don't know, I think some of them might be slightly interested in why I'm interested as well.

I wouldn't be sort of from that world or of that world.

And yet.

And sometimes they want to tell me that I've got something goddamn wrong, you know, and they want to set me straight.

Or sometimes they don't like a photograph that's being used with them.

They're humans and all the same emotions, really.

Well, most of the same emotions are going around with them and vanities and egos and all the rest of that.

I find overall, people who are involved in criminality, I often question why they don't just retire, they've made enough money, time to get out.

And I actually think they're addicted to the crime, they're addicted to getting one over on the authorities and rivals and they can never get out of it because it's just a lifestyle.

Nearly.

That's just a fantastic response, I have to say.

Final question, what lessons or advice would you give to people starting out doing this?

You've been doing this for some three decades.

What lessons have you learned?

What would you have done differently?

You've already, I think, underscored the importance of the work.

And I really, of course, agree with you, this idea that independent people also cover and write and try to understand what's going on in illicit economies.

But what couple of things have you drawn as lessons yourself as you forged your career in this sector?

It's an unusual career, let's say.

Or is it?

It is, for sure.

And it evolves.

Like, I didn't set out for this.

And I think in a way, that's probably the way for those to, you know, have a vague idea that they might like to cover crime, but I think you have to take baby steps in it.

I think the absolute best way of starting is covering a local court and getting a little sense of what's going on, because you see all forms of humanity.

You see the kids being brought in there, you know, up on drug charges, the grandmothers maybe, who are rearing them because the parents might have addiction issues.

You start to get an understanding of the world around you and why people are getting involved in it.

You see the same faces coming forward.

You probably meet young guards who are going to evolve with your career.

And certainly from my perspective, when I started out, a lot of guys I would have known or women I would have known back then who were just regular on the beat cops became heads of units, you know, they became commissioner, they became assistant commissioner, all the rest of this.

So they sort of evolved with you and your, your trust builds as you grow in it.

And I think you have to read a lot outside the country.

I mean, maybe when I started off, I didn't realize the importance about how international this was all going to be.

But you cannot look on crime as being something that just exists in a bubble in your territory.

You have to start to try and understand the worldwide picture of it and the fact that it is an economy.

Nicolette, thank you so much.

Cocaine, cowboys, a great book.

Lots of people, as I said, and it really gives you an insight into the evolution of irish organized crime.

Absolute pleasure to have a discussion with you.

Thank you, Mark.