DUBLIN — They’ve changed the name of the old Regency Hotel — now the Bonnington — but not much else from the day David Byrne was shot dead near the front desk, a mob hit that sparked one of Ireland’s bloodiest murder rampages and a 10-year international manhunt.
The brown-and-white lobby last week looked pretty much as it did on Feb. 5, 2016, when six men, some disguised as police and one wearing a dress and a wig, entered the hotel.
Byrne, a top figure in the Kinahan drug cartel, had been at a boxing weigh-in in a hotel conference room filled with innocent fight fans. When the gunfire started, he turned one way and was shot six times. His boss — Daniel Kinahan, then 38, the alleged leader of a cocaine empire estimated to be worth more than $1 billion — turned the other way, made it to the roof, jumped down and caught a flight to London. Then to Spain. Then eventually to Dubai, where he lived openly for years: building a sideline as a boxing promoter, attending fights, getting hair transplants.
Last week, Kinahan’s luxe life on the lam ended when Dubai police, acting on an Irish warrant, arrested him after 48 hours of surveillance at some of his favorite hangouts.
The arrest, a high-water mark for Irish law enforcement, was also a reminder of persistent obstacles in international crime-fighting as more criminal networks operate globally but in the shadows of the dark web: cartel kingpins protected by corrupt officials; organized-crime bosses aiding rogue regimes; ransomware extortionists and artful money launderers sheltered by pliant governments eager to profit from ill-gotten riches — all operating beyond the reach of extradition treaties.
Kinahan, the reputed leader of Ireland’s biggest crime syndicate, was more of an old-school fugitive, a mafia-style boss with personal networks and a taste for sunshine and the limelight — like the Havana-loving Meyer Lansky, but on Instagram.
It was not clear if Kinahan had legal representation in Ireland or Dubai. In media interviews over the years, he has denied any involvement with any criminal activity.
Apprehending him required Ireland to expand its reach well beyond its island borders, according to interviews with almost a dozen people familiar with the sprawling operation. Kinahan’s arrest in the shadow of the iconic Burj Khalifa skyscraper required Ireland to build a new liaison network and issue its first-ever Interpol arrest warrant. Ministers set out to negotiate a bilateral extradition agreement with Dubai, a Persian Gulf oil power long seen as a highlife haven for Albanian mobsters, Russian arms dealers and other outlaw expats.
“Because of the transnational nature of what we’re dealing with, well then we had to become transnational as well,” Angela Willis, assistant commissioner for organized crime of the Garda, Ireland’s national police, said in an interview at her Dublin headquarters.
Daniel Kinahan grew up heir apparent to one of Europe’s most powerful criminal organizations. His father, Christy “the Dapper Don” Kinaha n, built the cartel from the streets of Dublin’s south inner city into a transnational cocaine empire estimated at one point to control one-third of the European trade, according to police.
Daniel and his brother were raised in a rough working-class neighborhood near the sprawling Guinness brewery, just south of the River Liffey. For years, they coexisted with the Hutch family, a drug gang just north of the river. Eventually, gang leaders spent time running things from neighboring villas on Spain’s Costa del Sol.
“Everybody was all pals,” said one investigator who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern for their safety. “Like Goodfellas.”
But relations soured. Gary Hutch, a nephew of the gang boss, tried to kill Daniel Kinahan in Spain in 2014, missed, and shot a boxer named Jamie Moore instead. The families negotiated to keep the violence from spiraling. The Hutches agreed to pay 200,000 euros in restitution and allow one of the alleged attackers to be shot in the leg.
Gary was told he would live. Then, in September 2015, he was shot dead after being chased around a swimming pool outside Marbella. The feud was on.
The Hutch response was the Regency Hotel attack. Its audacity heralded a new kind of gangland violence in Ireland.
On a winter afternoon, about 270 boxing fans, including children, were in the hotel for the weigh-in of the “Clash of the Clans,” a boxing card promoted by a Kinahan-linked company. Two men entered through the hotel laundry room, one in drag. Three more came through the front door in tactical police gear and carrying AK-47s.
Byrne ran to his doom in the front lobby. Sean McGovern, another cartel leader, was wounded. Daniel Kinahan was pushed to safety by a bodyguard and ran for the roof. Jumping down, he fled to the airport and eventually reached Spain, where he began planning a massive revenge campaign.
The hits came almost monthly for two years. Three days after the Regency attack, Eddie Hutch, the gang leader’s brother, was shot dead at his home on Poplar Row. David Douglas, a former zookeeper who had already survived being shot once, was gunned down outside his shoe store.
James Gately, a Hutch gang associate, was shot five times at a gas station in north Dublin. Noel Kirwan was shot dead in front of his spouse outside their West Dublin home — investigators said there was no evidence he was active in criminal activities, but he had been photographed at a Hutch family funeral. There were even more innocent victims. Trevor O’Neill, a Dublin city worker on holiday in Majorca with his wife and children, was mistaken for a Hutch member and shot five times in front of his family.
Central Dublin was terrorized. For the first time, the Garda deployed armed emergency officers to walk the streets openly, standing outside schools attended by the children of potential targets.
Undercover officers tracked suspects as they bought burner phones and arranged weapon drops. The teams would wait for the tense window after a potential shooter picked up a gun — often left in stolen cars or trash bins — then move in for an arrest before they could pull the trigger.
They intervened to prevent a shooting 83 times in that period, Willis said, 51 of those directly linked to the feud.
The violence eased toward the end of 2018 as more gang members went to jail. But the bloodshed, and old loyalties, still weigh on the neighborhoods.
On a sunny afternoon last week, a reporter asked an elderly man walking his dog on Bridgefoot Street what he remembered of Kinahan and the shootings.
“You shouldn’t be asking after that name in this area,” the man said in a low voice, walking on. “You can get into trouble.” A minute later he was at the end of the block talking to a younger man, both staring back.
“He changed Dublin,” said Nicola Tallant, a journalist who wrote a history of the Kinahan feud. “It turned neighbor on neighbor.”
Kinahan, who relocated to Dubai around 2016, watched it all from a safe distance. The boxing management company he co-founded with former European middleweight champion Matthew Macklin — MTK Global — promoted big-money bouts and managed Tyson Fury and other top fighters.
“He was owning boxing as a sport,” Tallant said.
Dubai had long been seen as a glamorous bolt-hole for wanted criminals — illustrated by the Kinahan cartel’s own lavish 2017 wedding at the Burj al-Arab, reportedly attended by the reputed Neapolitan Camorra boss Raffaele Imperiale and other notorious figures.
Kinahan’s father, Christy Sr., also lived in Dubai, posting restaurant reviews on social media under an alias that was exposed in 2024 by the investigative journalism group Bellingcat. Father and son were photographed together at a UFC event in June 2025.
Irish police and diplomats, meanwhile, were building new international networks. Ireland had never issued a Red Notice, the standard mechanism by which countries flag fugitives and ask other nations to detain them. It had no extradition treaty with the United Arab Emirates. So the Garda began stationing liaison officers in Washington, Colombia and Dubai. Irish justice ministers and Garda commissioners flew to the Gulf.
“We knew that if we could collaborate with international partners, our chances of success were always going to be amplified,” Willis said.
A turning point came in April 2022, when, at Ireland’s request, the U.S. Treasury Department slapped sanctions on Daniel Kinahan, his father, his brother and four associates. State Department “Wanted” posters offered $5 million rewards for each of the three Kinahans.
Kinahan’s boxing business collapsed. The sanctions also made Kinahan a liability to Dubai, which was shedding its reputation as a fugitive safe harbor. Pressed by an international financial crimes task force that gray-listed the United Arab Emirates in 2022 over money-laundering concerns, Dubai had begun extraditing wanted figures to Albania and other Interpol partners.
In early 2024, Interpol began hosting meetings with Irish and Dubai police. The systems to arrest Kinahan were coming online.
First, a test run. Ireland issued its first-ever Red Notice for Sean McGovern, Kinahan’s lieutenant who was wounded in the Regency attack. Dubai police arrested him in October 2024. He lost a seven-month extradition fight and was flown to Dublin, where he pleaded guilty to charges of directing a criminal organization and is awaiting sentencing.
A week after McGovern’s arrest, Ireland and the UAE signed a permanent extradition agreement.
Then came the main event. In mid-April, Willis’s team worked with prosecutors to secure a high-court warrant for Daniel Kinahan’s arrest on the same charges and informed Dubai police. Within two days, he was in handcuffs.
Kinahan is expected to challenge the extradition, and it is unclear when he might be returned to Dublin to stand trial. If convicted, he could remain in prison into his 70s, closing the book on one of Ireland’s bloodiest alleged crime bosses.
His capture isn’t likely to mean the end of the cartel. Its alleged mastermind, Christy Kinahan, lives still in Dubai. Investigators say a succession plan is probably already underway.
“It would be naive to think that Daniel Kinahan is arrested and everything grinds to a halt,” Tallant said. “I have no doubt there’s a shipment of cocaine crossing the Atlantic somewhere as we speak.”
But Kinahan will leave another legacy as well, officials said: pushing Ireland into the global leagues of crime-fighting.
“It shows that for a small country,” Willis said, “regardless of where you run, we’ll come chasing after you.”
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