Cocaine cowboys | Global Initiative

At the end of the 1990s, Ireland experienced an economic boom known as the ‘Celtic Tiger’, a period marked by wealth, prosperity – and a surge in cocaine consumption. This booming drug trade fuelled the rise of the Kinahan Cartel, founded by Christopher Kinahan Sr and his sons, Daniel and Christopher Jr. As the Kinahans amassed wealth, their operations became synonymous with violence, assassinations and a bloody feud with rival criminal groups, most notably the Hutch–Kinahan feud, which spanned across Europe. 

The Kinahan Cartel’s influence grew to the point where they formed alliances with other criminal organizations, creating what Europol dubbed the European ‘super cartel’, which dominated the continent’s cocaine distribution network. Investigative journalist Nicola Tallant has spent years documenting the cartel’s rise to power, a journey detailed in her book Cocaine Cowboys: The Deadly Rise of Ireland’s Drug Lords. In the third episode of our podcast series Underworlds, GI-TOC director Mark Shaw spoke with Tallant, who shared insights on crime reporting and the complex relationship between journalists and the criminal underworld. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.  

Mark Shaw: Nicola, it’s so great to be speaking to you this morning and I really enjoyed your book. 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 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? 

Nicola Tallant: There’s a lot of reasons for that. Let’s talk, first of all, of the cocaine vulnerability of Ireland. We’re an island, so we’re on the edge of Europe. We’re the first stop from across the Atlantic and we have about 3 000 kilometres of coastline, a lot of which is rugged little coves, which have traditionally been used for smuggling over the centuries. So that’s our geography.  

Then you have to look at the social history of the country as well. We came out of a recession, that was pretty bad, in the 1980s, into the 1990s when we started, towards the end of the 1990s, 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. We became a country where people who had been unemployed, all of a sudden were working; they had money in their pocket as cocaine was becoming popular, and we are a nation that quite like to go out and party. So I think it was a bit of a perfect storm there.  

You also had a fallback from the days when there was a lot of tenement, people living in tenements in the city centre, 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 that never came. So you had these huge areas of social housing that saw massive unemployment. And that really gave grounding 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 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, the overview of it. 

MS: As you know, we’re doing research in different parts of the world, and we’re counting criminal assassinations. Violence generated by organized 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, (there is) a very big response in Europe. But here in Ireland, you have this constant drumbeat of hits and assassinations related to the cocaine economy. Why the violence? Outline one or two cases, if you wouldn’t mind. 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. 

NT: 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 a subject that’s of huge interest. As a result, you see a lot of media reporting. What we tend to get is outbursts of violent feuds within groups. By and large, in my work over the past 20+ years, that has been fuelled by cocaine, by the money in it, and by – in a lot of cases in more recent times – the youth of those that are involved in gangs. There’s a breakdown of the old gangland code and rules. And they immediately will turn to the gun. There is no 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 see feuds. In a lot of cases, these gangs, the more powerful they get, they almost implode rather than they are policed. And the Gardaí (Garda Síochána) here will try and dismantle these groupings, which is a huge, vast job that can take years of relentless pursuit of the gangs through raids and surveillance. 

But when that starts, when there’s a focus put on a grouping that creates a paranoia within the grouping, there’s questions about ‘Is there 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 were two very large feuds that occurred at the beginning of the century, the beginning of the 2000s. 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, given our population here in Ireland. They were relentless feuds, and they set the path for the gangs that were to come. 

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. But that broke out in 2016, and that was an extremely swift annihilation of one side, which believed they had the backing of the remains of the paramilitaries, but essentially didn’t. In a way, that feud in 2016 shows how that balance of power has toppled here in Ireland, because for years and decades, the provisional IRA (Irish Republican Army), the paramilitaries, really held the power. 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, the dissident groups that have come up underneath them who just don’t believe in the ceasefire are really disorganized. They don’t have that same militaristic power that the original IRA had. And while they always used the term ‘the IRA’ when they tried to extort money out of the drug gangs, you could see by 2016 that they had no power left, that all of a sudden, organized crime was in control here. 

MS: That’s fascinating, Nicola. So there’s this inflection point, say, 2016 onwards, 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 cocaine economies. Would that be a reasonable summary of what you think occurred? 

NT: There was very interesting detail in a trial that occurred last year, of Gerry ‘the Monk’ Hutch, who would be seen as the familial head of one side of that grouping, that Hutch–Kinahan 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 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 just a disorganized grouping, and they never got Daniel Kinahan to the table. 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 sort of a veteran, who came up and lived in a very different time, when he would have worked very closely with the Provos (Provisional Irish Republican Army) and shown respect to the provisional IRA and all the rest of it. And you could see a dawn of realization for him, that things had really changed. So there’s lots of other small incidents like that where you can see that pivot has happened. 

MS: Nicola, does the pivot essentially mean that organized crime provides its own violence, where previously you had to pay off or you hired people from established violent groups, which happened to be sort of paramilitary or the like. This is basically the shift, would you say? 

NT: The paramilitary groupings always basically tried to tax them. And they successfully did that for a long time. 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 and they come up with a new name. There’s so many of them. There’s the New INLA (Irish National Liberation Army), the New New INLA, the New IRA. But this grouping, 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 one or two groupings went up against them. And he was murdered in 2012. And there was a moment of ‘Is his death going to be avenged in such a way that we’ve never seen violence like it?’ But it wasn’t. 

That particularly showed how things had changed, the drug gangs had gone up against the dissidents, they had murdered them, and the dissidents didn’t have the power to fight back. It’s just an evolving thing, as organized crime always is. In Ireland, while we have those vast swathes of disadvantaged youth there that are easily groomed into these gangs, there’s also a large population of unemployed dissidents that are very eager to get a job. 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 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. They’ve gone for a career that’s pretty much gone, it’s in the past. So they have to find areas for themselves to make money. 

Now, of course, the paramilitary provisional IRA and the dissidents would absolutely deny that they tax drug dealers. They claim that they are there to community police and to force the drug dealers out of the communities. But, I mean, that ship has sailed, I don’t think anybody believes that anymore. 

MS: Fascinating, honestly, Nicola. It clearly has a set of fairly unique features, obviously related to Ireland’s history. Tell us about the Kinahan organized crime group. Of course, there’s coverage. There were these very funny stories, I think in The New York Times, about doing restaurant reviews in different places around the world. But this is a really powerful criminal organization. How did it develop? Who are the key players? The linkage to Dubai, for lots of reasons, is interesting. Some background, if you wouldn’t mind. 

NT: The Kinahan 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’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 Christian Kinahan Sr 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 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 because they might have been actually hungry, when they went out to steal and that emerged and evolved. A lot of them would be sort of anarchists 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 1980s when the big kingpin was taken down, a man called Larry Dunne. And in the late 1980s, he’s caught in an apartment in Dublin with 200 grams worth of heroin, which is a lot at the time. But also he’s with a well-known Lebanese criminal and that shows 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 becomes this legitimate businessman, except he’s dealing in drugs and weapons. His two sons, who are living in a very working-class part of Dublin, they have been building up a grouping around them and he brings them into his world, and 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 rivalry between the south side and the north side, which is utterly ridiculous, but that’s the way it goes. They bring together groupings from both sides of that divide and they head to Spain, where they start developing this massive wholesaling. They get business in the UK, around Spain, and they just grow and grow. By 2010, Europol, in one of its first attacks on organized crime, tries to dismantle the Kinahan organization, has recognized how big it is. 

The Spanish describe it as the ‘Irish mafia’ on the Costa del Sol. And there’s a big operation across a number of territories to take them down. There are arrests, there are 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 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 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. They’re seen as a grouping who can beat the state. And they continue to grow. Daniel Kinahan, the son of Christy Kinahan Sr, 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 begins to create what has become known now as the European ‘super cartel’. 

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 than probably they could even have considered themselves. When they were sanctioned by the US Treasury, they were valuing them at 1 billion and describing them as a murderous cartel, now based in Dubai. They actually went out of the reach of European law enforcement in around 2016, at the same time that feud broke out here in Ireland. That feud broke out because the Kinahan organization – as it was, the original Irish Kinahan organization – 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. (They) failed, and what resulted was this absolute overkill in order to re-establish that power. 

MS: 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. Has the Irish state attempted to get them back? What’s the story around Dubai? The politics, the discussion in Dublin or Ireland more generally? 

NT: Dubai is the new Costa del Crime, isn’t it? Everybody from all over the world – Australians, South Africans – they’re all there. Every country in the world is looking for somebody, some major criminal head back from Dubai. They basically are there operating, directing their movement of cocaine, their movement of guns. They appear to be somewhat operating with impunity. I don’t know a huge amount about 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 on-the-run crime bosses who are coming with their billions but without much of a reputation. Some of them are there actually on the run and wanted. And we’ve seen Dubai hand back some of those individuals, including Raffaele Imperiale to Italy, Ridouan Taghi to the Netherlands. We have been seeking Daniel Kinahan for quite some time. There’s currently a file with our Director of Public Prosecutions here. He is suspected of murder and directing a criminal organization. 

The process to get him back appears to be very complex, very political. We had two members of our Garda’s Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau based in Dubai for six months, laying the groundwork for this to happen. Our Garda chief, Drew Harris, has travelled to Dubai and he has created content with Dubai police, very high-end video content for their social media. The Emirates are always trying to claim that it’s not a sanctuary for criminals, but sometimes it’s hard to see that it isn’t when you see the amount of groupings that are based there. 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 – whoever it is, be it Daniel Kinahan or anyone else – when 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 slush around their economy. 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. 

MS: 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 assessment of how the Irish state more generally has responded to the issue of organized crime as the number of killings have ramped up, as cocaine use has ramped up. Is there any sense, for example, that money from the cocaine trade has infiltrated politics in Ireland? 

NT: I don’t know if it’s totally infiltrated politics as of yet. It’s certainly been seen to have infiltrated some policing. The big hacks in Europe, EncroChat and SkyECC, really showed how drug gangs and organized crime groups seek corruption as part of their business. 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. The warnings coming from Europol are that you need to be really aware of this. Every country does. And on top of it. 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, they do operate like any corporate business. And while they don’t have maybe offices and departments, they kind of do as well. A lot of organized crime groupings will have a PR wing and media relations people who reach out to journalists. I found this quite fascinating when I opened my eyes to it. 

And they will have people out there looking for those to corrupt, whatever you’d call that department. In Antwerp, recently, a case came before the courts of an organized crime group that are purely existing in order to identify corruptible individuals in the courts, in the media and 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 port worker, for example. What’s their mortgage like? Have they got any 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. 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 exist. There was an incident here, which I found very concerning, where an individual was discovered to be working within the general revenue service with links to an organized crime group. And, of course, if you think about what Revenue have, they’ve everything on you, don’t they? They know your dependents. They know your status. They know your tax returns. They know your earnings. It’s quite a lot of information that could come out of there.  

Corruption is part and parcel of organized crime, and Ireland is no different to anywhere else. And people have their problems and their weaknesses. We all work with a variety of individuals with all sorts of different issues going on in their lives. I think here as well as everywhere else, it’s 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 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. But after 2016, when this big feud erupted, there was a lot of social media, anonymous Facebook and anonymous Twitter sites that went up that were giving detailed information, intelligence that should have almost been coming from the police. There was actually an investigation into one site here in Ireland because it appeared to be 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 or 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. To get a vague idea of what their motive is, because 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. 

MS: Nicola, you’re saying that – and it became normal as an experienced journalist – people reach out to you. They’ve identified a set of journalists, and they are planting a story or attempting to get better coverage or ‘sweeter’ coverage. Is that more or less what is happening? 

NT: Absolutely. And you have to really think, because you have to work out what it is they’re looking to plant. 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’. 

MS: 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? 

NT: I 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 that they were trying to have 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 – they were trying to plant a seed that if somebody just takes this guy out, this is the end of it. And that’s just one very, very small example of what they were doing. Some of the stuff is 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 odd characters, Christy Kinahan Sr and his son, Daniel Kinahan Jr. 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 Sr was leaving restaurant reviews. And then one time while doing these reviews, he was capturing an image of himself in a mirror of a hotel room or whatever. I’d be very sceptical about that because my work has taken me a little bit into the complex mind of Christy Kinahan Sr. 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.  

All the way back in 2010, when Operation SHOVEL happened and the raids occurred in Spain, the Spanish police picked up a huge amount of information about a Brazilian development that the Kinahan organization were involved in. And they were selling properties. They had purchased a corner of Brazil on the Brazilian Riviera, and they were building this huge hotel, country-club complex, and there were all sorts of fancy brochures, etc, and this was to be the jewel of the crown if they could seize this. You’re working with other countries, obviously, and trying to find ways that Europe can work with Brazil, etc. But in the immediate aftermath of it, I had found a journalist in Brazil who could go down and have a look at this. The brochures would tell you that this place was ready to sell, that there was building work. And the journalist went down and just found a dirt track. There wasn’t a foundation built, there was nothing. It was in an area where properties were really worth nothing. 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 SHOVEL collapsed over the past few years that this did take a lot of time and effort. I always wondered, was that thought out? And I do believe it was. 

And I also believe that the Kinahan organization 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. We’ve seen him tied in with Tyson Fury, former world champion. And get credit from Bob Arum in the US, the famous promoter. People speak out about him. And of course, Daniel Kinahan 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 it almost happened for him until he was named in those US Treasury sanctions. 

MS: It’s really an amazing story. Information, disinformation… What’s the role of journalism in all of this? Many of the people we interviewed (for the podcast) are either former organized crime figures, a couple of journalists. But what’s the role of external actors in covering these issues? Is it just to fill the crime section of the bookshop? Is there a social role for the work you do? A political role? 

NT: I think it’s very important. Everywhere journalism is breaking down. The media is under pressure. No media organization is 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 if it’s going to be killed off. But all the while in organizations across the world, you’re seeing redundancies, you’re seeing fewer and fewer journalists. And from a small point of view, there was a very important court case that wasn’t covered, I think because the journalists were on holiday and there was nobody to 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 as they used to be. Some of the court cases aren’t being covered and I think 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 people in nightclubs taking it. There’s this wide picture of what’s happening, where that money for each deal is going, what this is creating. All the way up. From a deal today, anywhere in the world at any point in time, somebody hands over €100, 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 funding wars.  

Without the journalism and the work that pulls together those threads and maybe gives ordinary people an understanding of it, and those connections and the joining of those dots, we could be living in a very naive world where we just don’t get it. 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 a Europe that doesn’t want to buy it. And there is this disconnect between particular middle-class drug users who go out at the weekend, who feel that ‘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 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 it’s not a job for everybody. But plenty of people are still doing it. But those threats are coming back down the line from very bloody powerful organizations. 

MS: The one thing that really emerges from this book is just this vast array of characters, whether they’re junior hitmen or more senior criminal figures that you’ve already outlined. What’s with the character nature of the narrative, is that because you had collected information on these individuals and then you sewed it into a bigger story? Why that approach? Do you think that’s something that is specific to Ireland? 

NT: There’s certain criminals that have almost a celebrity status. Their names are known, they’re household names. I don’t know if that’s unique to Ireland, because our laws are quite strict. 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 called the Gucci gang, the Monkey gang is another crew because when there was a raid done on their premises, there were a couple of monkeys found in cages, which I think were just for ornamental purposes. But 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 over the course of the decades who have been very significant organized crime figures and probably very stupid, because they’re not in the shadows.  

They all actually have these pretty cruel nicknames. Any physical problem you have is usually honed in on and usually by their own community, not the media. There’s one guy, ‘Fat Freddie’ Thompson. And you don’t actually need to use a second name, it’s just Fat Freddie, everybody knows who you’re talking about. And I actually always found it quite amusing that I knew when Daniel Kinahan had reached a particular stature, that he might be on the national media, RTÉ or something, and they would just refer 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. I was working in media at the time, and this sea change came when they just became obsessed with celebrities, actual celebrities who didn’t really do anything particularly interesting. 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? We’re in newsrooms now, and we’re literally looking at the trends on the walls, on computer screens. We can see exactly who’s reading what, how long they’re reading for, what stories are engaging with them. But there were decisions made in the media back in the 1990s. 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 crime is covered, it just doesn’t seem to have that same interest. Maybe things are changing again now, with those statistics, because I go into our newsroom and I can see who’s reading what, and they’re all reading about crime. 

MS: Interesting. Our podcast wouldn’t be complete without me asking you about sourcing. Obviously not who you’re 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. 

NT: I’ve been nearly 30 years working in this business, so I have built up trusted contacts over those years. A trusted contact is somebody whose story proves to be true again and again. And that’s how you have to build that, both within the legitimate world and the underworld. 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 want to come and give information for whatever reason. But it’s fascinating. And of course, I approach people myself. 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, it’s just a safe place to go.) But it took me ages to realize – the penny dropped eventually – that it’s more dangerous for them than it is for me, actually. Because, while many things have changed, the overriding sense of omertà and that you never speak and you never tout and you never rat. And it would be seen as that, criminals talking to journalists. While some might be sanctioned by their umbrella organizations, many aren’t. 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. 

MS: And why do they talk? Planting stories is one thing, but more generally, why do people in the criminal milieu talk? 

NT: I suppose ego is one reason. And some of them do like a little bit of publicity for whatever reason they do. They used to say, the newspaper I work for, Sunday World, was very full of crime stories. They used to call it the Hello magazine of the criminal underworld. 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, ‘Why don’t the police go after the corrupt politicians and the bankers?’. 

MS: They have a good perspective. 

NT: They have quite a good point. I don’t know, I think some of them might be slightly interested in why I’m interested as well. I wouldn’t be from that world or of that world. And sometimes they want to tell me that I’ve got something goddamn wrong and they want to set me straight. Or sometimes they don’t like a photograph that’s being used of them. They’re humans and all the same emotions, really. Most of the same emotions are going around with them and vanities and egos and all the rest of that. 

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. 

MS: 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 underscored the importance of the work. And I really 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? 

NT: It is for sure. And it evolves. I didn’t set out for this. And I think in a way, that’s probably the way for those to 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 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. When I started out, a lot of guys or women I would have known back then, who were just regular on the beat cops, became heads of units, they became commissioner, they became assistant commissioner, all the rest of this. So they evolve with you, and your trust builds as you grow in it. 

And I think you have to read a lot outside the country. Maybe when I started off, I didn’t realize the importance of that, 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. 

MS: Nicola Tallant, 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. 

NT: Thank you, Mark.