From The New Yorker, October 20:
The Cocaine Kingpin Living Large in Dubai
The Burj Al Arab, which opened in Dubai in 1999, has often been called the world’s only seven-star hotel. The rating is unofficial—hotels are generally ranked from one to five stars—but it befits the de-trop vibe. The building, which was constructed by an army of migrant workers, is shaped like a billowing spinnaker and rises on a man-made island off the coast. Half an acre of gilt adorns its interior. There’s a restaurant surrounded by an aquarium—a portion of beluga caviar costs seven hundred dollars—and a helipad upon which Roger Federer once played tennis against Andre Agassi.
In May, 2017, Daniel Kinahan and Caoimhe Robinson, both Dubliners, were married at the hotel. The groom—short and burly, with thinning dark hair and eyes like coal—was weeks from his fortieth birthday. The bride was in her mid-thirties, with bottle-blond hair and ice-white teeth. One can assume that the toasts skipped lightly over the newlyweds’ previous relationships. Robinson’s former partner Micka (the Panda) Kelly was murdered in 2011, in Dublin, by an assassin, who shot him fourteen times before reversing a car over his body.
Underneath a giant chandelier in the ballroom of the Burj Al Arab, the couple sat on thrones, surrounded by a colorful crowd of family, friends, and business associates. One of the revellers was Tyson Fury, the six-foot-nine former heavyweight champion of the world. He has sometimes worked with Kinahan—a boxing impresario who is also known, to law-enforcement officials, as the head of the Kinahan Organized Crime Group. (Although social media was banned at the wedding, Fury reportedly tweeted about his attendance before deleting the post.) Other guests included some of the most powerful cocaine traffickers alive. Among them were Ridouan Taghi, a Moroccan Dutch man responsible for several murders in the Netherlands; Edin Gačanin, a Bosnian Dutch man who led the Tito and Dino cartel; Ricardo (El Rico) Riquelme Vega, a major Chilean drug importer; and Raffaele Imperiale, a debonair Italian linked to the Camorra. Shortly before the wedding, Italian police found two stolen van Goghs—“View of the Sea at Scheveningen” and “Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen”—at the home of Imperiale’s parents, near Naples.
When major criminals gather in the same room, cops tend to pay attention. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration had long been interested in Kinahan. One of the agency’s informants attended the wedding, as a guest. This person mapped out the constellation of gangsters at the ceremony, and provided a video of the event to American agents. The surveillance helped investigators ascertain that these men, most of whom lived in Dubai, were working together to launder money and smuggle cocaine from South America to Europe. The D.E.A. shared its intelligence with international agencies. Soon, journalists and police in Europe began calling the group the Super Cartel. Europol analysts estimated that the network controlled a third of Europe’s cocaine trade, which was worth as much as twenty billion dollars a year. An Garda Síochána, the Irish police force, recently estimated the Kinahans’ wealth to be about a billion dollars....
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