Original subtitles

This programme contains strong language,

scenes which some viewers may find upsetting,

and prolonged violent scenes.

This is cold. I got Gatorade and green tea in here.

Makes me feel like a crazy man.

I'm Jack Kelly.

I'm a retired special agent from the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The DEA.

The Kinahans are in my news feed.

I'm following everything.

I was reading about the Kinahans and the war they had with the...

..with the Hutch. 18 people get killed?

It's like mayhem on the streets!

Nothing ever happens to these dudes.

But Daniel Kinahan,

he made what I call the John Gotti mistake.

"I'm like one of the top gangsters in the world.

"I'm living it up in Dubai.

"I'm hanging out at the pool every day.

"But if no-one knows who I am, what good is it?"

And then he decides to get into boxing promotion.

I'm just after getting off the phone with Daniel Kinahan.

The biggest fight in British boxing history has just been agreed.

Get up there, my boy!

Now everyone knows who the Kinahans are.

The dude was becoming the shiny object.

There's cops all over the world,

and they want to be the guy that gets that head up on their wall.

It's their ego.

It always brings them down.

The Kinahan Transnational Criminal Organisation,

also known as the KTCO,

has been accused of a wide range of heinous crimes

all around the world, including murder...

GUNSHOTS

.trafficking in firearms and narcotics.

We begin with breaking news today.

A drug bust at the Port of Philadelphia.

What you see here is only a quarter of the total seizure.

It was 39,524 lb of cocaine,

valued at about $1.3 billion.

Bingo!

The Kinahans were street dealers who became billionaires.

You showed us that you've got massive balls.

At $140,000!

Sold!

When you see the DEA are on their case,

you're up there with the most wanted globally.

You're in the league of Pablo Escobar, Chapo Guzman.

They'd come a long way.

The United States Department of State is pleased to announce

a reward of up to $5 million

for information leading to the financial disruption of the KTCO,

or the arrest and convictions of its leaders,

Christopher Vincent Kinahan...

..Daniel Joseph Kinahan...

..and Christopher Kinahan Jr.

The United States will bring their leaders to justice,

no matter where they are.

BROADCAST PIPS

BROADCASTER: A very warm welcome.

Looking forward to the pleasure of your company

for the next three hours.

I don't know.

I bet.

No problem, mate.

All right. Cheerio.

John Glynn is on the line.

He's general manager of what's now known as the Bonnington Hotel.

It obviously was the Regency Hotel.

There was hardly a day when the name Regency was not in the newspapers

or on radio or television, known as the Regency shooting,

the Regency killing, the Regency attack.

That must have been extraordinarily difficult.

It was, Joe.

It was the last thing that I ever thought of could happen

in the Regency.

I'm Ernie Leslie, a photographer with the Sunday World,

and my colleague here, Alan Sherry.

Say hi, Alan. How are you?

We were assigned to cover a boxing weigh-in which was taking place

at the then Regency Hotel...

..and which was involving MGM boxers,

which was run by Daniel Kinahan.

He was trying to show himself as a different character

to what was being portrayed in the media as a gangster.

He comes across as a very personable type of guy,

as long as he's not trying to shoot you!

We were hoping that we would get photographs of members of the gang,

either Daniel and Christopher Kinahan,

or other associated members of the gang.

There was a feud going on at the time, between three or four

different shootings, some fatal, some not,

in the build-up to this.

They were escalating to the point that it was going to reach a head

at some stage.

I suppose whenever there's a gangland feud,

there's always a chance of something happening.

BACKGROUND SHOUTING AND CHATTER

My name is Mel Christie.

I'm currently the chairman of the Boxing Union of Ireland.

Clash of the Clans was a major international promotion.

It was a sell-out.

On an official level,

there was no problem back in 2016 with MGM,

save for what was being written in the tabloids.

But, I mean, we're not fools.

There's no smoke without fire.

But turning up for the weigh-in on that day,

there was absolutely nothing untoward to be felt or seen.

As we drove in,

we didn't see anything that we recognised.

So it was kind of a bit flat, atmosphere-wise, to be honest.

We were almost at the end of having weighed in 18 fighters.

A fighter from Mayo, his weight had been declared,

and I was in the process of converting pounds to kilos,

when all hell broke loose.

CRASHING

SHOUTING

We were sitting there probably just talking shite, like you do,

and suddenly a bang went off.

BANG

It sounded like gunshot, but of course we didn't actually believe

that that could be happening at an international boxing weigh-in,

in the middle of the day, in a hotel full of people.

We no more had the words out of our mouth

when I noticed people running across the top of the street in panic,

and I just quickly realised that that's exactly what was going on.

There was a male dressed in a skirt and a long wig,

beside a middle-aged gentleman wearing a flat cap,

and it was one or both of those who had fired shots

at the back of the hall.

GUNSHOTS

There were little kids there, and now they were part of a war zone.

Within seconds of that bang, was just people started flying by.

There was people in cars, mounting footpaths up here.

They were just all getting out whatever way they could.

We immediately shot out.

Bang, bang, bang, bang. There was more shooting.

GUNSHOT

I was in the hotel bar with the general manager of the hotel,

running through the business for the weekend.

There was a couple of shots fired.

Within, then, maybe 15 seconds,

three uniformed Gardai came in to the bar area

and told everyone that this is the Gardai,

to lie down on the floor and put your hands behind your head.

GUNSHOT

At this point, I was starting to panic.

I really didn't believe these guys were Guards.

I heard two gunshots and two gunmen dressed up in Garda uniform

came in through the front door into the lobby.

One guy was running through the lobby.

He just shot him in the leg.

I jumped straight over the receptionist's desk.

The gunman then leaned over the receptionist's desk.

He was pointing the gun down at me and I was screaming,

"Don't shoot! Don't shoot!"

I thought I was going to die, like, you know?

It was utterly terrifying.

There was a couple of shots fired.

And then just through a window in the bar, I saw a man

basically getting assassinated.

GUNSHOT

It's all happening so quickly.

You're hearing gunshots going off.

You're trying to ascertain where they're coming from.

And as we approached here, we noticed the silver van.

The window was open and a hand popped out with a machinegun.

I stopped the car immediately, grabbed the camera,

and as I pulled it up to shoot, something running,

movement from down the end of the road caught my eye,

and it was a person running towards us, which didn't look right.

And I immediately switched from the car,

banged off a number of frames.

I knew that I had got something really significant.

At that point, people dressed in fake Garda uniforms

who were the so-called tac team with their assault rifles as well

start making their way back towards the van.

But then the driver's attention was drawn towards us.

The assault rifle turned around from pointing forward

to suddenly turning back, pointed at us.

And we weren't in an armoured car.

So if he started opening fire, we were fucked.

Came back to the van.

And at that stage, Alan was telling me...

"Get the fuck out of here," is what you said!

I think it might have been, yeah.

BLEEP.

I got a bit of a sinking feeling when I saw

there was no cars out there at all. There was nothing.

I'd made my way down to the reception

where I had heard the explosions.

And that's when I saw the horrific scene there.

There was a person lying on the ground...

..faceless.

His face had been removed...

..obviously by one of the gunshots.

We discovered what had happened inside not too long after,

but it was very apparent very immediately

that there had been someone shot dead inside.

We knew who he was aligned to.

We knew it was an attack on the Kinahan organisation,

and we knew who the main suspects would be because of

what we'd been writing about for the previous few months.

This is the offices of the Sunday World here...

..on Talbot Street. Media House, it is now.

I'm Nicola Tallant, I'm the investigations editor

with the Sunday World.

And I've been a journalist for nearly 30 years.

So the newsroom is on floor three.

In my journalism, almost every story I've done has gone back to cocaine.

And then in the last 20 years, really, every story about cocaine

has gone back to the Kinahans. That's how significant they are.

Afternoon. In to do a little bit of... A little bit of...

..podcasting now. Yeah.

How's things? Good.

Not bad, not bad.

So when people talk about Ireland, they talk about drugs,

your brain goes to the Kinahans.

They've really put us on the map internationally.

They're on wanted posters.

There's five-million bounties on their heads.

If they were a football team, we would be celebrating.

We would be welcoming them home in an open-top bus.

They're not. They were street dealers

who became billionaires.

The Regency wasn't an isolated event.

It was a culmination of the implosion of the Kinahan organised crime group,

which started, really, months previous.

Things started going wrong. There was jealousies.

There was accusations of touting,

there was accusations of money being owed.

There was a lot of kind of building tensions that we,

just as newspaper journalists, were able to read the signs of.

NEWS: Detectives believe the attack was part of an ongoing

Dublin criminal gang feud.

The dead man, David Byrne, and the two injured,

were known to Gardai.

David Byrne was dead.

Hugely significant individual.

The brother of Liam Byrne.

The two of them headed up the Dublin headquarters,

essentially, of the Kinahan cartel.

He was a friend of Daniel Kinahan.

Very, very friendly with all the top kind of players

of the Kinahan cartel.

You knew, once he was killed,

that there was going to be serious retribution.

GUNSHOT

After the Regency happened,

it was almost like an explosion went off

and there was kind of this reverberating white noise there.

The funeral is taking place today of David Byrne

and has sparked a major Garda security operation.

The David Byrne funeral was terrifying.

It was a mafia funeral, held in Dublin,

and the police had to stand back and let that happen.

The headline is "Bling out your dead."

I'm only quoting from the newspapers.

"The funeral will forever go down in history as being

"a who's-who of the Irish criminal underworld."

# Gone is the day Gone is the night

# Gone is the day

# Gone is the day

# Gone is the night

# Gone is the day... #

RADIO CALL-IN: Absolute show.

Flaunting the money they have got from drugs.

This is the mob's type stuff.

This is Mafia-type stuff.

Why are our Guards there protecting them?

NICOLA: It was a display of power,

and it was choreographed to spread fear.

It was an absolute look into the dark heart

of the Kinahan cartel.

You know, they came out en masse wearing a uniform -

blue shirt, black tie.

And Daniel Kinahan was photographed here, front and central.

It put the Kinahan name

into the consciousness of Ireland.

People were talking about the Kinahans.

They were wondering who they were, where they had come from.

How come the city has been shut down for this funeral?

To understand that, you had to go all the way back to the ambition

of Christy Kinahan and where that started.

Christy Kinahan Sr would be like a cuckoo in the nest

of organised crime.

He doesn't really fit.

ARCHIVE: It is pleasant as you stroll through Stephen's Green

to see sitting there, relaxed, at their ease,

the well-fed, happy citizens of Dublin enjoying the view.

Christy Kinahan Sr came from a very stable family home,

and he was the only boy in that house,

so he was spoilt, doted on, adored.

This is the street where Christy Kinahan actually grew up.

This is a very desirable location to live.

His father was working up in a taxi rank up at the Gresham.

His mother actually ran a B&B from their home here.

This is not the normal place where an organised criminal

had grown up.

He kind of had everything, and he could have been everything.

But instead, he chose to take all those talents

and to bring them into organised crime.

Somewhere around his late 20s,

we find him in an environment where he doesn't belong.

He's eyeing up criminal enterprises,

knocking around in the north inner city.

His middle class manners mean that he's a great sort of fixer

for the gangs.

My name is Michael O'Sullivan.

I'm a former Assistant Commissioner in An Garda Siochana,

which is the Irish police force.

I joined the Guards when I was 20.

Dublin at the time was quite depressed.

There was a recession on.

There wasn't a lot of employment.

There was a lot of crime.

So Chris Kinahan, he didn't feature very highly.

He was a petty enough criminal, for want of a better term.

He was what's described as a kite man,

which is a cheque man.

He'd be a guy who could pass himself off as English,

or as well spoken from Ireland.

He would put on a posh accent and go and bounce cheques

and disappear again.

As criminals go, he was inconsequential.

However, he was very strategic in the way he would think,

and he was always looking to earn that extra money.

He was an opportunist,

and he began to see that there was an easier life

than bouncing cheques, and there was far more money in it.

And he decided that he would get into the heroin business.

Dublin's sudden heroin epidemic is now threatening

the very lifestyle of the city,

where children as young as nine and ten have taken the drug,

and in some areas, there's some heroin addiction

more than in the worst black ghettos in New York.

We've heroin sold on the streets of Dublin in ten packs,

costing £10 each.

It would contain sufficient for one injection, one fix.

And that's what the kids are queuing up for?

Yes, that's what the young people would buy.

One minute, heroin wasn't there,

and then the next minute, it seemed to be everywhere.

Friends used it.

Cousins used it.

Family members.

Not unusual to have everybody in the family using heroin.

And it brought about complete chaos.

In the spring of 1981,

the then Irish Prime Minister, Charles Haughey,

summoned the country's top four policemen

to an unprecedented emergency meeting on drugs.

He began by asking, "Who the hell are the Dunnes?"

Most of Dublin already knew the answer to that question.

The Dunne family, they were THE crime family in Dublin city.

It was common knowledge

that Larry Dunne had introduced the heroin.

The public saw him as the Al Capone of Dublin.

The police believe that it was this family who pioneered

Dublin's heroin epidemic.

Follow that car, huh?

My name is Ronnie Byrne and I'm a community activist

for the last 40-odd years in the south-west inner city.

So just here on the left is Dolphin House Estate

and Dolphin House.

I grew up in the flats there.

I haven't been up here in a couple of years now.

Right.

It was a great place for us to grow up in, you know?

It was always very friendly.

Most people were in harmony.

You'd have the odd stupid stuff going on here and there.

But, yeah, generally it was a good area to grow up in.

You know?

Up until around the '80s. when the drugs come in.

Bingo!

I could never imagine a world without heroin, never.

Never.

You'd do anything for it. Prostitute, do anything.

You know, it's just a thing you have to...

..you have to have.

BABY CRIES

Born addicts,

these babies are Dublin's youngest and most innocent heroin victims.

I've got two drug addicts over in my own home.

Don't bring this pain and sorrow on yourselves

and your families. That's it. Yeah.

Where I lived, on any given day, there would have been

20 or 30 addicts on the stairs, leading up the stairs.

No problem dropping their trousers, injecting into their groin

or injecting anywhere.

They had to get the money to feed the habit.

Now they were assaulting people and robbing them

and taking their handbags and breaking into people's homes

and stuff like that.

Like, people robbed their own parents, their own siblings.

I actually sleep with a hammer under my bed.

I mean, I feel I have to protect my two children,

and if anyone comes in, like, I'll kill them.

Half the children's dying,

they're walking around like resurrections,

and no-one cares about them.

Irish police now estimate that Dublin has been subdivided

into ten areas to be worked by ten major heroin gangs,

but the police have had their successes.

There's only one person in town behind all this,

and it was Larry Dunne.

Eventually, the law caught up with him.

Anti-drugs campaigners were out in force, as they have been

every time Dunne's appeared.

This time, they had something to cheer about,

as one of Dublin's biggest drug dealers was sent to jail.

100 years, he should have got,

the lot of them, and anyone belongs to him!

There's plenty more Larry Dunnes around,

and everybody will have to stand together and root them all out.

Before he was sentenced, Larry Dunne said,

"Look, if you think I'm bad,

"you want to see what's coming behind me."

Very prophetic words. And he was right.

SHOUTING

SIRENS WAIL

As police finally close down the gang,

there are others waiting in the wings.

It was a very challenging time for the Irish police force.

So I eventually went and worked with the Garda Drug Squad.

The small unit became known as the Mockies,

because we were mock addicts.

You hung around flat complexes for hours trying to wait

for the gear to arrive.

And it was essential for your safety

that nobody twigged that you were a cop.

From working in Dublin City,

you began to realise there's somebody else in the market.

There was this constant flow of heroin

starting to take over the market.

And it was more reliable and more consistent,

and there were different individuals behind it.

And after a period of investigating, the name Chris Kinahan came up.

He was the figure behind it.

He was at the top of the apex.

And the beauty of it all is he's not known to be in the drug trade.

He's not known as a real criminal.

In fact, he's not known at all, realistically.

But Chris Kinahan, he fancied himself,

and his desire to show off was his downfall.

We had heard that he drove a red sports car,

which was unusual in recession-hit Dublin at the time.

We saw the car arrive in what was then a luxury flat complex

in the suburbs of north Dublin.

So we had to figure out what flat he was in.

Myself and another guy, dressed as electricians,

went around the flat complex,

knocking on doors and trying to figure out who was in what flat.

On one or two occasions, people asked us about fridges.

I know we fixed one fridge on one of the floors.

I saw Chris Kinahan, I saw some activity at the flat he was in,

so realised we had it identified.

We went to the door with my colleagues.

It was opened by an Algerian man who was also in the apartment.

We identified ourselves and went in.

Chris Kinahan was seated at a table, eating a salad roll.

He looked up and visibly paled.

On another table was what I could only describe it as the mother lode.

He asked me my name. He said, "What's your name?"

"Sullivan," I said, "it is."

He said, "I was told to look out for you."

I told him, "You should have took that advice."

Following the jailing of several major drug dealers in recent times,

other people moved in to set up new importation

and distribution networks, and this was one of them.

When drug squad detectives raided the luxury apartment at Fairview,

they found Dubliner Christopher Kinahan

with over £100,000 worth of heroin.

This shows the kind of ambition he has.

This isn't just some sort of a local drug dealer

selling gear on the streets.

This is somebody with the ambition to become a major player

internationally.

Gardai believe the apartment was the nerve centre

of a big drugs ring.

He's caught with an Algerian

who is well known on the international stage.

He's making international connections.

He's gone from being the guy, the fence who sold the stolen goods

to being a major, significant character

on the international stage.

He's been described to the courts as the director of operations.

So that's a very significant step he's taken.

Judge Moriarty said a horrifically high quantity of heroin

had been found in the apartment.

Kinahan was jailed for six years.

As a civil society, they go to jail.

That's what we believe ends a criminal career.

But in actual fact, Christy Kinahan used that time

to make even more serious contacts,

to grow his ambitious plan for the future.

I mean, at the time, you just think it's the fall

of another drug dealer.

But, you know, this is just the beginning.

Oliver Bond flats has gone absolutely buck mad.

Crack cocaine, cocaine, heroin,

E tabs, you name it, it's available.

People comatose on the stairs because they've injected.

You see sexual favours being given on the same stairs.

# My mind is going... #

It is at that scale in Oliver Bond at the moment.

# There is no question about it... #

This is the south inner-city Oliver Bond flat complex.

It's here that Christopher Jr and Daniel Kinahan were brought up

by their mother, Jean Boylan, who was a cleaning lady.

Their father was absent when they were children

because he was in and out of prison.

This area would have been ravaged, really, by drugs.

Jean Boylan, by all accounts, was somebody who helped out

with addiction charities.

And she seemed to have wanted something different for her boys.

I don't know a huge amount about Christopher Jr.

He seems to be, maybe we'll say the boring one of the two.

Daniel is a different person today than the person

he was when he was here.

If you talk to people who knew him at the time,

they describe him as a guy who was one of the lads.

He was a bit of fun. He was a bit of a prankster.

There was obviously a totally different life waiting for him.

One evening, I went for a run through the city centre.

I thought I saw somebody in a car looking at me,

so I realised I was being followed.

The car came whizzing over behind, and passed me.

I glanced at it and I realised, I said, "That's Chris Kinahan."

I went back to the office and I said to some of the guys,

"I'm after seeing Chris Kinahan." So they told me,

"You couldn't have seen him. He's still doing time."

So we rang the prison and found out that he was released.

He was sentenced to six and a half or seven years - far too lenient.

But that's... That's the way it was in those days.

You only ever get one chance to catch a serious drug supplier,

because they've learned from their mistakes.

Christy Kinahan Sr came back for the Kinahan boys

as they came of age as teenagers here.

His presence gives them a bit of kudos, a bit of street.

Daniel undoubtedly is looking up to his father as his hero.

He wants to become him and he creates his own little fiefdom

within the Oliver Bond flat complex.

It was here where they made a decision to follow their father

into organised crime.

Two guys on a motorbike shot the victim four times in the head.

We don't even know who the guy is yet.

But it's another night in Dublin. This is another gangland killing.

Just another one, you know?

I'm Paul Williams. I was the former crime reporter

at the Sunday World.

I've been covering crime for about 35 years.

I suppose, sounding a bit like a junkie,

you got addicted to it.

We've just got a call there a few hours ago from somebody

who's been working with us closely.

There was a fascination with crime in Ireland,

and because there was so much crime happening,

So there was a fascination with these shadowy figures.

We have our Mafia-type godfathers now.

These guys were getting more dangerous, more sinister,

more prepared to blow anybody away, who got...who tried to stop them

or tried to expose them.

I put together a surveillance team. We went out after them.

We just photographed them.

And of course, they started selling huge amounts of newspapers.

But, like, the world fell in on top of myself,

and my other crime reporting colleagues at the time,

when Veronica Guerin was murdered.

NEWS: Veronica Guerin, one of the Republic's

foremost journalists, specialising in stories

about underworld and criminal figures,

was shot here on the Naas dual carriageway about ten miles

from the centre of Dublin.

Veronica Guerin was a colleague of mine.

She was a very single-minded, very capable journalist.

And she was murdered because she did her job and she asked the questions

that nobody else was asking.

Veronica's car was just up there now.

I walked over to Veronica's very distinctive red car.

She was lying there in a very smart suit.

You could see this mass of dark,

it was clearly blood, but she was lying

and she was being held back by the...by the...

..by the safety belt.

It was... It was fucking horrible.

That image is burned into my memory.

After Veronica was murdered, for me, it wasn't business,

it was personal.

I feel that I have a duty to keep going.

That's what a free press is about.

And no gangster with no gun is going to stop us.

Christy Kinahan wasn't involved in this outrage,

but he was a senior member of this emerging new generation of narcos.

And there was a small group at the time.

They counted about five or six major players.

They were all working together.

Veronica was murdered because she asked a crime boss,

"Where did you get your money?"

And they decided to murder her.

And they thought they could do it.

This was the beginning of a whole new era of organised crime.

Thousands of people have been attending the funeral of

the crime reporter Veronica Guerin.

Among the mourners was the Irish President, Mary Robinson,

and the Prime Minister, John Bruton.

Veronica Guerin was denied her right to life by organised crime.

Her murder represents a direct attack on our democracy.

The Irish Parliament has approved sweeping new legislation

to deal with the growing problem of organised crime linked to drugs.

Armed with new powers of search, the Gardai are getting tough.

The Criminal Assets Bureau has opened its doors

to television cameras.

Accountants, police, customs, social security and tax investigators

trace assets of major criminals from here.

There's no messing around with this.

They say to you, "You owe us,

"and if you don't pay us up, we're going to take your house."

The government brought in the Criminal Assets Bureau,

and they could go after the assets of criminals.

And, of course, then it had the effect of forcing

Christy Kinahan's fellow drug traffickers to leave the country

and base their operations outside of Ireland.

Christy Kinahan in the '90s decided to flee from Ireland

and find a safe haven in Amsterdam.

Behind here, behind that tall building, and all those buildings,

that's really the old Red Light District.

And that's where Christy Kinahan was hanging out.

Organised crime was, basically, in the centre of town.

I think it was Paul Williams who referred to Amsterdam

as the Wall Street of the international drug market.

Be it Irish, British, Spanish, Colombian, Venezuelan, you name it,

and they were all here to do the same illegal business.

Christy Kinahan came to Amsterdam in the middle of the 1990s.

The wall in Berlin had fallen.

The mood of most nations in Europe turned very optimistic.

And ecstasy was actually a drug that fit that mood perfectly.

When Christy Kinahan came to Amsterdam,

that thing was on the rise and he saw the market

and he saw a chance, and he took that chance.

The boom was from, like, '93, '94 on into the new century.

And that was really the time where Christy Kinahan

and his associate, John Cunningham, were in the Netherlands.

When Christy Kinahan was nicked for the big heroin haul,

John Cunningham and Christy Kinahan find themselves on the same landing

in prison, after one was convicted of drug trafficking

and the other was convicted of kidnapping.

John Cunningham, referred to by his accomplices as the Colonel,

had decided to go for the big one.

John Cunningham was very much a part of that generation

of professional armed robbers.

He was always after the one big job,

and that was a kidnapping where they kidnapped Jennifer Guinness,

who was married to the heir to the Guinness fortune.

REPORTER: The gang forced their hostage into a car and headed north

towards Swords, leaving a demand for a ransom of £2 million

and the code word Jackal.

This was going to be the key to the big time,

and they'd never have to work again.

They were caught.

REPORTER: Mrs Guinness's eight-day ordeal ended

just before seven o'clock this morning.

It was around midnight that police tracked Mrs Guinness

and three members of the gang who abducted her

to a smart Dublin townhouse.

Shots were fired and he was arrested.

John Cunningham told the Gardai, "It was going to be the big one,

"but it went wrong."

He was jailed for 17 years.

This would be part of the general story of organised crime,

is that the relationship and friendships that build up

on the landings in the prison become lifelong friendships.

It was from that time on that himself and John Cunningham

basically become partners in crime.

John Cunningham caused a major embarrassment for the Irish

authorities when he absconded from Shelton Abbey open prison

in County Wicklow.

In September 1996, Cunningham was in open prison,

he did a runner and he gets out of the country

and he was smuggled into Amsterdam.

Christy puts his arm around him, introduces him to the drug trade,

and that's the start of probably one of the most powerful

criminal cartels in European history.

MUSIC: Open Your Mind by U.S.U.R.A.

Rock and roll is dead -

that's the view of a lot of young people.

From Russia to the United States,

it's been replaced by what they call a cultural revolution -

dance, house or rave music.

And with the music were the drugs, in particular what's termed

the ultimate fashion accessory, ecstasy, or E.

Unbelievable, you know, it's hard to explain,

but you just get a rush up your spine

every time you'd hear a good tune, you know.

You'd start feeling it and then you're getting heavier and heavier,

you know, the rushes you get off it,

it pushes your adrenaline level up real high, you know.

Suddenly, the music starts getting going, going around dancing

and that, you know.

For the pushers of drugs, there's no shortage of work or profit.

It's a lucrative, if dangerous, trade.

By the mid-1990s, the criminal landscape had changed.

All of a sudden, this whole generation, who would never

have probably gone down the drug route, were seeing this

as being a fun night out.

There was E parties everywhere and there was raves.

And Christopher Jr and Daniel start ecstasy dealing in Dublin,

in the south inner city, with their father's product

from Amsterdam.

In particular, Daniel seems to start providing his own group with drugs,

and I think Daniel sort of morphs into the father,

and there was only one way they're going, and that's

after Christy Kinahan Sr out to Europe to learn the drug business.

At the beginning of 1997,

Christy Kinahan Sr breaks cover and comes back

to his father's funeral.

He's wanted in Ireland on £16,000 worth of stolen traveller's cheques.

They were taken in an armed robbery and he was caught cashing them,

so he was wanted on that charge.

He comes home, he's busted.

I was assigned to interview him with another colleague

and, by his very nature, Chris Kinahan wouldn't say very much.

During the course of the interview, he remained silent

for quite a period of time and broke the silence to say,

"You think you're so smart. I followed you."

I said, "I know," and I told him the car and the registered number

of the car that he followed me in.

And then he went silent again

and that was the last conversation we had.

But it was the intent,

the menacing intent that he would try

and get inside your head.

Portlaoise has been the country's main high-security prison since

IRA prisoners were transferred there in 1973, and a continuous guard

of over 100 troops back up the Gardai, who in turn back up

the prison officers.

My name is David McDonald.

I was a prison officer.

I served in Portlaoise Prison from 1991 to 2000.

Part of my role was in the education unit, where I came in close contact

with the prisoner known as Christy Kinahan.

So, the prison was known as the most secure prison in Europe.

It was a maximum security prison.

So we had a lot of troublesome and difficult prisoners.

It's not difficult to remember Christy Kinahan,

even from back then.

He was charismatic. He was very calm.

He kept himself immaculate. He kept the cell immaculate.

He didn't cause bother.

He used his time extremely wisely, which very few prisoners do.

Studied courses at a very high level.

Degree level in both Spanish and Russian.

Because of my role in the education unit, I would see his marks

and they were always very, very high. Very, very high.

I've never seen a prisoner ever refuse early release.

Never. Not in 31 years.

Christy Kinahan was offered early release. He refused it.

He was doing a degree course at the time.

He reckoned he could do it better inside the prison.

And I don't want to come across that I'm saying I admire

Christy Kinahan. There's a reason why the US have a five-million

bounty on him and also on his two sons, so I'm not an admirer.

But the truth is he was a little bit of royalty

in a goldfish bowl of thuggery.

When Christy's in prison, and he knows his business is OK,

Daniel Kinahan, who's now just in his early 20s, is very much

involved at a management level on the Irish side of his father's

international drug trafficking operation.

There was no doubt about that.

There's an intelligence document here from 2000 which clearly

points out the fact that, you know, "Daniel, on the instructions of

"his father, Christopher, is visiting him in Portlaoise Prison

"approximately three to four times a week."

At this stage, he was well and truly under Daddy's wing and on his way

to taking over the family business.

These are the new weapons of the drugs war.

Miniature submachine guns are now part of the armoury

of Ireland's criminal gangs.

Fitted with silencers, their deadly purpose is obvious.

But 15 of these weapons, along with 10 pistols

and over 300kg of cannabis, are in the safe hands of the Gardai

in Monaghan.

It's understood the drugs and weapons were hidden

in a consignment of frozen food, which landed at the Port of Dublin

yesterday morning.

Just before Christmas 1998, a couple of pallets of pitta bread arrived

into a food storage facility down on the border

in County Monaghan, and when it was being moved, it accidentally

was broken open by a forklift truck and out of it spilled

nearly a ton of hash

and an arsenal of 20 or more machineguns, machine pistols

and automatic pistols.

It was an extraordinary find and was found purely by accident.

A major investigation begins to track down the source

of that stuff, which ultimately leads back to Amsterdam

and to John Cunningham.

And when the Dutch go after you, that meant that every phone

that John Cunningham used from then on was bugged.

Well, I prefer to protect my identity because, over the years,

in the National Drug Unit,

we deprived the Kinahan organised crime group of many millions euros

worth of drugs, etc, and I'm happily retired now

and I'd like to stay that way.

Well, the Dutch police, they were running into some difficulties

with the Dublin accents and also with some of the slang terminology

that was being used.

Myself and a colleague would go over on a weekly basis to assist

the Dutch police, listening to the wiretaps and assisting them

with interpretation of what was being said.

To have all those telephone calls on a computer screen in front of you

and listen to them as often as you wished, and back and forth,

it was amazing.

At one stage, as they're listening to these conversations

with Cunningham, they listened to this voice and it turns out

it was Christy Kinahan ringing from Portlaoise Prison,

where he's still in the nick, studying...one of his degrees.

Prisoners are allowed to make very brief phone calls.

They're recorded.

Everything's recorded and listened to and they know that.

Christy Kinahan was extremely clever.

He managed to get a mobile phone smuggled into him, which was a feat

in itself because, back then, mobile phones were the size of a brick.

It allowed him still to run his empire from inside the walls

of the maximum security prison in Europe.

There were lots of conversations on the phone between Christy Sr

and John Cunningham.

Christopher Kinahan always assumed he was being listened to,

and as a result of that, he spoke in code.

Timber usually referred to cannabis.

Powders were either brown, being heroin,

or white, being cocaine.

It was quite obvious they were arranging the importation

of drugs and weapons.

CHUCKLES: From his prison cell!

Like, when he got nicked, never stopped.

When he's taken out of the picture, Kinahan, John Cunningham has

the same kind of ability when it comes to organisational ability,

and he then continues to run the business.

And actually Cunningham,

over the next three to three and a half years,

builds what Kinahan had left behind him.

He builds it into a massive operation because in the period

of two years, his first two years in the helm, when Christy's

in prison, he transports something like

£150-£200 million worth, at the time, of drugs into Ireland.

But then Cunningham is arrested again.

Ecstasy tablets, each with a street value of £10,

over 100,000 of them, in packets that could slip into a handbag,

cannabis, carefully wrapped, part of a consignment worth

more than £6 million,

and more than £500,000 worth of amphetamine powder -

the haul of drugs from what the Dutch call Operation Clover.

They believe they have smashed a racket

in which Dubliner John Cunningham was the central figure.

It's now known that Cunningham and his associates were the subject

of a vast surveillance operation

mounted by police forces in Holland, Belgium, the UK

and Ireland, using phone taps, videos and covert observation.

By the time Cunningham was arrested again, the boys are massively

well embedded in the whole fabric of organised crime across Europe.

They are players, and luckily and happily for the boys,

Kinahan comes out of prison and takes over the reins,

just as his friend is busted and put back in prison.

They continue to build this massive...

..probably Europe's most powerful drug cartel.

And it also is at a time when the demand for drugs

amongst ordinary, law abiding citizens of Europe

goes through the roof.

Only one drug is so addictive,

nine out of ten laboratory rats will use it...

..and use it...

..and use it...

..until dead.

It's called cocaine, and it can do the same thing to you.

With the mass introduction of cocaine to Ireland,

there was this really dramatic upsurge in gangland violence.

The only way to settle arguments was to kill.

He wanted to get to the pinnacle of world boxing,

which he actually nearly did.

I'm sure Daniel can hold his own in a head-to-head.

LAUGHTER

This was an attempt to take off the head of the snake...

GUNSHOTS

..and they'd missed.

What had they unleashed on themselves?

The Kinahan organisation wanted to wipe out anybody

who bore the name Hutch.

The murder may be linked

to the ongoing Hutch-Kinahan gangland feud

that has claimed up to 18 lives.