MONEY WASHING | 

Kinahan Cartel targeted by US because of links to Hezbollah, ex-garda chief reveals

A $5 million reward was offered for information leading to the arrest of godfather Christy Kinahan and his two sons, Daniel and Christy jr.

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The US government targeted the Kinahan Cartel because of their ties to a global money-laundering scheme run by Hezbollah, a former Garda Assistant Commissioner has revealed.

In April 2022, the US Department of the Treasury sent shockwaves across Europe’s criminal underworld when they issued sanctions against the leaders of the Kinahan clan.

A $5 million reward was offered for information leading to the arrest of godfather Christy Kinahan and his two sons, Daniel and Christy jr.

The move came after years of behind the scenes meetings between senior gardai and American law officials.

Speaking on a new Financial Times podcast called ‘Hot Money – The New Narcos’, retired Garda Assistant Commissioner John O’Driscoll said the Irish mob’s ties to Hezbollah were their downfall.

It is believed Hezbollah are providing a money-laundering service for some of the world’s biggest drug cartels through an informal money transfer system called Hawala.

John O’Driscoll – who headed up the force’s operations against the Kinahans following the Regency Hotel attack – said the gardai provided intelligence they had gathered on the links with the US government.

“I would’ve been privy to the intelligence that we had gathered ourselves in Ireland.

“And then other jurisdictions had gathered additional information and bit by bit the jigsaw was being put together in terms of establishing how significant, in fact, the Kinahans were on the global stage.

“As time emerged, and as the eyes of US law enforcement more generally were focused on the Kinahans, it was realised that the money laundering associated with that drugs empire involved the Kinahans utilising organisations that may potentially have links to international terrorism.”

He added: “Well that would be a conclusion that would be reached primarily by the US authorities, having been satisfied, having received initially information from the Irish law enforcement, UK law enforcement, and they then pursuing that line of inquiry would then have, concluded that in fact there is potential that, there, there is a financing of activity that could be associated with the Iranian state.”

The Kinahan’s European allies – dubbed the super-cartel – also have long standing ties to Hezbollah and their paymasters in Iran.

In 2016, a Dutch mobster with direct ties to the Iranian regime was found hiding out in a safe house in Ireland

When he was hiding out in Ireland, Naoufal Fassih was wanted in connection with a number of gangland murders in Holland, including that of Mohammad Samadi who was an Iranian who had been sentenced to death by Tehran but who was living in the Netherlands.

He’d been accused of being behind a 1981 bombing that killed 73 people.

Detectives investigating the murder were convinced that it was a political assassination and that Fassih had carried it out for Tehran after the Kinahan group were asked to find a shooter.

Further investigations found that the Kinahans and other criminals based in Dubai had been using the Hawala underground banking system – which was an informal way of transferring money but which was also directly funding Hezbollah, who got a cut from every transfer.

Under Project Cassandra, the US Drug Enforcement Agency began investigating the ‘Hawala’ money transfer system in Europe after it established that Hezbollah was using it to facilitate ‘the movement of large quantities of cocaine into Europe and the United States’.

Under the same operation, the DEA said it had identified participants in the ‘intricate network of money couriers who collect and transport millions of euros in drug proceeds from Europe to the Middle East.”

In 2022, the high-profile arrest of the Kinahan cartel’s main money launderer Johnny Morrissey at his villa on the Costa Del Sol, Spanish police revealed how he had used Hawala to launder €200 million in just 18 months.

Christy Kinahan Snr was also discovered trying to buy Egyptian military planes for his own ambitions to take over the transport route to Africa but in a detail which the DEA suspect was beneficial to Iran.