Exploring the Kinahans’ Iran links as Middle East war intensifies

0:00This morning, Iran zeroing in on American interests across the region, a suspected Iranian drone hit near the U.S. Consulate. The United States military, together with the wonderful Israeli partners, continues to totally demolish the enemy far ahead of schedule. Iranian state television today airing a violent message from Iran's Ayatollah Abdolah Javadi Amali in that message, the Ayatollah calling for the quote, shedding a blood from President Trump and Israelis. The outbreak of international warfare likely wasn't on the bingo card for the kin and cartel when they decamped to Dubai, yet that's precisely the scenario they now find themselves in. As the U.S. and Israel fronted offensive on Iran intensifies, the future of just about everyone in the Middle East is precarious and uncertain.

1:05That naturally includes the notorious Kinahans, sealed very much a prime target for authorities, particularly on Gartashi-Ikana. So, what does the Iran war and its multiple backgrounds mean for a transnational criminal enterprise operating on the fringes? And what links did the Kinahans have to order aggressors in the region? It doesn't necessarily imply the people are ideologically aligned with Iran or Hasbola, but they are working for a fee and they're engaging in the sort of providing a service. I'm Fiyanan Shihin and today on the Indo-Daily, I'm joined by Miles Johnson, investigative reporter with the Financial Times, and host of Hot Money, the new Narcos podcast. To look at the fate of the Kinahans in the Middle East, their links to Hisbalah and Iran, and the possibility of their extradition. So Miles Johnson, a lot of people's lives have been turned upside down by this latest

2:10conflict in the Middle East, the US, and Israel striking Iran, and then Iran striking back across the Middle East. Now, it's put the spotlight on Westerners living in the United Arab Emirates, Dubai, in particular. Amongst them, Ireland's very own notorious crime cartel, the Kinahans, who have basically fled to the Middle East because they're wanted across Europe. No, we're not going to have much sympathy for their situation. Can you tell us what do we think we know about where they are and what their up to these days? Well, the most recent reports of indicators that they remain in the UAE, remain in Dubai, and people have spotted them there. I myself spoke to someone in Dubai not that long ago who said that they knew people who had seen them, or at least thought they'd seen them. They are where everyone thought they were, and you know, that's sort of been some way

3:13it's quite remarkable stuff. Basically, the international police agencies, our own Gartesheqon, included believe, is that they're running their operation remotely at such a fine-tuned business enterprise at this stage that they can do that. They don't necessarily need to be on the ground and their operation, running out of the Netherlands and Ireland is still there. We were talking previous in this show about how they've left gaps in the market here into which other people have flowed and filled, either those management grades or supply grades. Then there was a suggestion that some international criminals, the Kinahans included, might be thinking that Iran would be a kind of a safe haven to move to. What do you make of that? If you are an international criminal who's wanted by Western governments, there are only a certain number of places in the world you can go where you will be safe and insulated

4:15from extradition. As we've seen with associates of the Kinahans, you can be extradited from Dubai. So in the worst-case scenario, you might think, well, I want to go to somewhere like Iran, which is known for harboring sort of wanted criminals from various countries and also Russia. But there's a big trade off there. When you're living in Dubai, you're surrounded by all of these sort of bling things and sort of stuff that Instagram influences like and these sort of restaurants and nightclubs and fast cars. And that is really not something you're likely to be able to have if you move to Iran. And you also have to start making big trade-offs where if you're expecting a country to host you, then normally you have to be doing something useful in some form for that country. And so you could sort of start with a certain set of problems in one place and then quickly see a whole new and maybe far more perilous set of problems emerge if you decide to take the plunge and move to somewhere like that.

5:17There is one kind of exception to the rule and that there isn't an Iranian island on which the culture I suppose is more lex. Today, I am going to take you inside of one of the most interesting places in the world. Some would refer to it as the Dubai of Iran. They say this is completely different. They say Americans don't even need visas here. Yeah, so there's an island called Kish Island. There's come up a feb in the reporting on the Kinehands and other organized crime groups. And Kish Island is a sort of free trade zone where there's slightly more permissive rules about things. It's sort of a known sort of smuggling area and it's used by sort of lots of different types of people, being reports in the past that some of the sort of money laundering operations of the Kinehands have sort of perhaps gone through Kish Island in some form. There's a lot of things we don't know and won't maybe know ever or for at least for a long time about exactly what they're doing. That is something where there has been speculation in the past that they might have or choose

6:21to later sort of abscond to there. I suppose from our perspective here in Ireland, we saw what we regarded as a very significant development four years ago when basically the Americans became involved in the hunt for the Kinehands, the U.S. Treasury announcing sanctions against numerous top members of this organized crime group, sometimes after that, then we saw a senior gang member, Sean McGovern, being extradited by the United Arab Emirates authorities. Detective Sergeant Donald Lowe daily gave evidence that he arrested Sean McGovern at casement aerodrome and that he charged him with five offenses when he arrived at the CCJ. Mr. McGovern is charged with the murder of no Kirwan on the 22nd of December 2016, as well as facilitating and directing a criminal organisation in relation to his murder. But the gang's hierarchy remains in place. It still suggests that they are in control of their

7:25wealth and of their organisation. So what sort of impact does sanctions have in an organisation that, again, its structure is not formal? If you're sanctioned by the U.S., you're suddenly cut off from the Western financial system, which in practical terms meant that let's say you were sanctioned some more, you would take your bank card and you would try and take out money from a cash machine. You wouldn't be able to make any payments by anything, use any of your accounts, move money or receive money from anyone. So it sort of makes you a sort of financial leper, you are completely out of the system. But that kind of actually would mean that to a certain extent for an organisation which is already operating in the criminal world on a global scale, moving large amounts of dirty money around, those sanctions might affect them less than one would think. So obviously in the legitimate world in terms of any type of public facing, supposedly

8:29legitimate business they might be doing. Yes, it's extremely damaging. They can't have company ownership, they can't have company accounts, they can't do business with the normal sort of regular financial world. But if you're an international drugs trafficker, you're not moving money officially through bank accounts anyway. So it might mean that that actual, the sanctions actually have slightly less effect than they would do on a more conventional password, let's say. So how realistic then is it to expect a state like the UAE to actually extradite the Kennen's leading members? You need charges, you need to build a case and then actually sort of grow a direct tradition that way. We haven't had against the very top members that there's significant debates about speculation. There is clearly pressure on the UAE to not harbor international criminals. The UAE has made comments and public steps to sort of appear that it's clamping down on that

9:33sort of activity, but it's clearly harder than it would appear. Yeah, and it would seem as well that the American's attention apart from being on its current, what Donald Trump is calling peacemaking true wars, but their attention in terms of the drug trade seems to have shifted and is kind of more solely focused on Mexico as we've been seeing recently. And also, Trump has been complaining about Venezuela and was saying that was one of the reasons for the intervention there. So maybe the likes that Kennen's have dropped down the pecking order I think that's a really important point. If you look at the way the sort of US Department of Justice functions, there are political priorities set by administrations and they do try and deliver cases that match those priorities to a certain extent. And right now, some Irish organized criminals in Dubai are not high up to the list of priorities for this administration. As you say,

10:34they're focused on Latin American drug cartels and Mexican cartels and Venezuela, which is sort of generating political commentary and political traction in Washington, is in that part of the world back in sort of the backyard as they would see it of the United States and not somewhere which you see the sort of far away. It doesn't mean it's over, but I think it is important to note that yeah, the politics of what's going on in Washington does affect where people's priorities and where people don't have a certain amount of bandwidth or capacity to pursue and build cases when attention shifts it does shift to the detriment of other things. We've seen in the past that there tend to be connections between terrorist groups, criminal groups, rogue states, true back channels. We're looking at the kinens, they're based in the Middle East. There's suggestions as well that they have connections with a terrorist group

11:38like such as Hezbollah. How does that kind of thing work? It's pretty complicated. It needs to sort of be seen in a kind of nuanced perspective where you have these these organizations. Their sanctions, non-state actors like Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, but sort of operates in Lebanon as a sort of political party as well as a sort of sanctioned terrorist organization. They have members who engage in criminal activity, money laundering and drug trafficking and things like that. There's always a debate amongst experts over to what extent that activity is centrally coordinated and to what extent is people operating under the auspices or kind of brand of the organization but doing it for the personal profit. In 1982, the Israelis attacked southern Lebanon against the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which was causing many problems at the time. And as a result of that operation, Iran stepped in to create a new organization called Hezbollah as the prime focus of anti-Israeli opposition throughout the Arab world. And since then,

12:44they've used Hezbollah for lots of other things. And so when you have these sanctioned groups, they interact with the global criminal economy. And so let's say you are drugs trafficking organization like the Kinahans and you need to learn the money, you may come into contact with those organizations that way where for purely pragmatic business reasons, you will choose to work with people who you may know exactly who they are. You may not know exactly who they are. Or they may be one step removed. They are connected to these groups. And then you may for just business reasons think, okay, these people can launder my money or these people can do this or that. And it's almost like your service provider. So and that works in different ways. So we've also seen organized crime groups be hired by Iran to murder dissidents abroad or kidnap people. And again, it doesn't necessarily imply the people doing the murdering are ideologically aligned with Iran or Hezbollah, but they are working for a fee and they're engaging in the sort of providing a service

13:46to commit a crime. It's pretty logical if you look at it, a terrorist group, a criminal group, they both need to launder money, they both need to to traffic and smuggle goods and services. It's not inconceivable that weapons and drugs can be transported in the same shipment. There's obvious crossovers there. There's a suggestion that investigators were able to tie together a connection between the kinetans and the murder of an Iranian dissident. Can you talk to me about that? Because again, that's a really complex case. Yeah, so that was the very interesting case that we looked at pretty closely. There was a Iranian dissident who had been wanted by the Iranian regime for decades because he had been accused of killing a lot of senior Iranian officials in a bombing attack in the 1980s. This man was murdered in the Netherlands. It turned out that the person

14:50who arranged that murder, who was actually, he was a very well-in-dutch criminal, he had arranged that murder on behalf of the Iranian states through various sort of middlemen, but he ended up being found in a kinetan safe house in Dublin. That linked the kinetans to this, you know, effectively was a political assassination. It was 14,000 euro and cash all over the place. In one room, we found two Rolex watches, a combined value of 25,000 euros, and importantly, there was personal documentation for the two top people in the organized crime gang. That case was extremely interesting in showing the way in which these different worlds connect and the sort of hybrid nature of some of these criminal groups where when you have states like Iran and Russia, and this had become a much more accepted fact since then, back then this was seen as quite weird and quite hard to understand, whereas now people are much more willing to sort of accept that the use of criminal proxies by sanctioned states like Iran and Russia because you have governments which come

15:54under the sweeping sanctions by Western governments and they have all of their diplomats expelled from capital cities and stuff. They have to start using sort of hybrid and asymmetrical strategies to pursue their goals abroad. And so that could be instead of using your own people, you actually hire criminals on the ground to do things like spy on people, commit attacks like awesome attacks or even kidnap a murder people. I can see a new series of the wire coming out of this, but it's on a global scale though. I mean, it's already fascinating the lines that can be connected between these various groups and individuals. As you say, this is not ideological, this is just business. We will take care of this job for you. You will take care of that job for us. There's another issue here which goes it's massively under radar, similar to drug shipping and that is the interconnections on the

16:59weapons trading site, not necessarily directly involving the kinens, but you are seeing high profile business deals being being struck between Iran and other countries for international arms, which partly explains how they're able to hit back at the moment when they're coming under attack. Well, yeah, Iran has a significant indigenous ballistic missile program. It's clearly as everyone will be able to see it from the news able to fire both missiles and drones, which has been a pioneer in very low cost drones, which are exported to the technology to Russia, which is used to attack Ukraine. This is all part of the same phenomenon, which is that we live in an age of economic warfare where there is a battle to control who gets the move money around the world and how it's moved around the world. In the case of Iran and Russia, they're heavily

18:00sanctioned countries, which have been cut off from the Western financial system. So in terms of international trade and that, in this instance, would be weapons. If you're a sanctioned country, you need to find different ways of transacting and moving goods and services around the world, because you can't use normal banking channels. In the case of Iran, you've seen a lot of use of cryptocurrency and barter trading, even physical shipments of cash, massive amounts of cash in hard currency and in bills, there's literally air drops into somewhere to pay for something. It's the same part of the same phenomenon, why you would then also turn to, for example, criminal organization to conduct dirty business for you abroad. It's the same thing. You can't use conventional methods. So you have to turn because of sanctions, because of this struggle to cut these countries off from the global economy. You have to turn to strange and unlikely service providers, which could be international drugs cartels. What we're seeing in the middle east at the moment, given that places

19:07like Dubai have become a kind of a hideaway for international criminals. Now geopolitics comes along. What was supposed to be their safe haven is now becoming slightly less safe. Are we going to see that these criminals, not because the authorities are chasing after them, but because the war intervenes, they're going to need to move on and try and find somewhere else. I think it's definitely been a big shock. I don't think anyone was expecting targets in Dubai to be hit by Iranian drones, but at the same time, shouldn't be exaggerated how dangerous they're on the ground. I think people mostly continuing to live a normal life, but it definitely is a shock. It raises new questions about the overall sort of stability of that place, just as a result of its geography. Panic chaos and injuries that the Dubai airport overnight. Shahed drone striking a luxury hotel in Dubai's Palm Jamira. It is possible that it has sort of long-term effects, but it's hard to say with the criminals

20:16who are there, it still has a massive amount of appeal for a certain type of person. These are still people who they like, you know, expensive restaurants, expensive cars, expensive hotels, stuff which is hard to get elsewhere, especially in a country where very few questions are asked about the origin of your money and people generally only care about how much money you have and not where it came from. And so I expect it would take probably even more shocking events to sort of really dislodge that sort of clientele, let's say, from that place. Yeah, and an issue that arises for a gang and a cartel, indeed, like the Kinahan, is you're dealing, when you start dealing with the likes of Hezbollah and the Iranians, you're drawing on wanted attention on yourself if those connections become exposed by the Americans and the Israelis. So it's a risky business. Why bother getting involved with people like that? Why not quit while you're ahead? Did it really

21:22need those kind of connections in order to keep their business going? There's always a debate over to what extent someone would be fully aware of exactly who they're dealing with or what they're dealing with. And so these sorts of relations can happen over time. And the example of the murder in Holland we discussed earlier, that would be an example where we don't know to what extent the people involved in that murder really knew who the end customer, let's say, was you could be operating and dealing with someone for a long time who eventually would be proven to be connected to Iranian foreign intelligence or Hezbollah or something like that, but you wouldn't really know at the time that's what they were doing. And people can have lots of hats on at the same time. In this sort of criminal underworld, you could be a money laundra who's working for a nation state or a non-state actor backed by a nation state and also tax evaders or drug traffickers or

22:23all sorts of types of criminal activity. You may be doing lots of things at once and you also may be someone who works for an organization like a designated terrorist organization, but you're also doing a bit of criminal activity on the side. It gets complicated. People often don't fall into just clear identities. They can be doing lots of things at once and for different reasons. Yeah, anybody who wants to delve into the history books can look at the Iran Contra affair. That's a story for another day, which will explain enough a lot of what the current scenario is. Miles Johnson, thanks very much for explaining that intricate web to us. Oh, well, thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm Finan, she and today's episode of The Input Daily was produced by Dave Hanrati, researched by Dave Hanrati in Philip Kauman, recorded by Rory Bones with sound designed by John Smith. Archive clips from the BBC News, Channel 4 News, Crime World, RTE News, Sky News, Virgin Media News and the Irish Dependent. We want to earn your trust and our members of the

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