The Irish Drug Kingpin Daniel Kinahan Is Arrested in Dubai

Illustration by Ben Wiseman Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story Almost exactly twenty years ago, an Italian police squad burst through the door of a dilapidated farmhouse near the town of Corleone, in Sicily, and arrested Bernardo Provenzano, the capo dei capi of the Sicilian Mafia. Provenzano was seventy-three years old. He had been on the run since the nineteen-sixties. The last known photograph of him was taken in 1959. So elusive had he proved over the preceding decades that some people thought he was already dead. In fact, Provenzano had been living a peasant’s life for many years, subsisting on cheese and chicory, while directing the operations of the Mafia using encrypted notes on pizzini, or tiny scraps of paper. Detectives located him by following the meandering path of laundry, sent to him by his wife, via multiple messengers. When he was arrested, Provenzano told the officers, “You have no idea what you’ve done.” He died in custody ten years later.

The IrishmanEd Caesar reports on Daniel Kinahan, the cocaine kingpin living large in Dubai.

No such mystery surrounded the whereabouts of Daniel Kinahan, the forty-eight-year-old Irishman who was arrested in Dubai on April 17th. He was reportedly apprehended at one of his family’s many properties in the city, no manhunt necessary. Despite being sanctioned in 2022 by the U.S. Treasury for running “the day-to-day operations” of a vast drug empire believed by Irish investigators to be worth a billion and a half dollars, and despite a five-million-dollar reward for information leading to his arrest, Kinahan has lived openly in the United Arab Emirates for a decade. He shops at the mall. His children attend private schools. Recently, the Sunday Times of London and Bellingcat, the open-source-intelligence group, published photographs showing Kinahan attending an M.M.A. fight at the Coca-Cola Arena, in Dubai, last summer. He looked as if he was having the time of his life.