Is crime boss Christy Kinahan untouchable?

Gardai investigating Barr’s death suspected him of providing the military assault rifles used by the criminals who tried to kill Kinahan’s son Daniel at a boxing weigh-in at the Regency hotel last February as part of an ongoing feud. The suspicion alone sealed his fate.

Barr had recently admitted to handling a shipment of stolen electronic equipment and would have been sentenced by the Special Criminal Court on Tuesday. He would probably have been jailed on the republican wing of Portlaoise prison.

Drug dealers are traditionally wary of attacking republican paramilitaries, but Kinahan’s gang appears to have no such qualms. Gardai believe the criminal leader was partying in Dubai when Barr was murdered. While the tabloids suggest the New IRA will avenge his death, few gardai believe this is likely. “The Kinahan gang has more guns, gunmen and money, and the dissidents know it,” said one detective.

The gardai appear to be powerless to stop the violence. Some of the murders have been in daylight and in heavily populated Dublin communities where the gardai have armed patrols and checkpoints.

On Tuesday, John O’Mahoney, the assistant garda commissioner in charge of national security, resorted to issuing a public appeal urging those involved to “take stock” of their actions. This served only to raise further concerns about the ability of the force to confront Kinahan and his killers. Is the arch-criminal known as the “Dapper Don” now untouchable?

Kinahan and his gang are now reputed to be among the wealthiest criminals in Europe. The cartel is run like a multinational business, with operations in several European countries, Africa and South America.

The EU’s security services describe Kinahan as the chief executive of Kinahan Crime Inc. His son Daniel allegedly oversees the cartel’s global crime operations while another son, Christopher Jr, runs an international property and business portfolio estimated to be worth up to €1bn.

Kinahan Crime Inc is known to have invested in commercial property and holiday resorts across Europe and South America, and recently started investing in South Africa.

Kinahan Sr grew up in a council flat in St Teresa’s Gardens in Dublin’s south inner city and got involved in petty crime such as house-breaking, car theft and burglary in the 1970s. His first serious conviction came in 1987, when he was jailed for six years after being caught with heroin worth IR£117,000 in Marino, Dublin, following an operation led by Nóirín O’Sullivan, now the garda commissioner. Kinahan told his trial judge he was a heroin addict who was trying to turn his life around, and vowed to study to avoid a longer sentence. True to his word, Kinahan committed to education in prison, obtaining a degree in French. He is now fluent in Dutch and Spanish.

He was imprisoned again in 1998, for possession of stolen travellers’ cheques, and served this sentence on the maximum security wing of Portlaoise prison. He left for the Costa del Sol on his release in 2001. It was at this point he entered the superleague of criminals by organising fraud, dealing in weapons, and trading in huge shipments of drugs from South America. His gang also became specialists in fraud and money laundering. In 2004, Daniel Kinahan was implicated in an alleged race-fixing scandal but never charged.

The transnational nature of the cartel’s operations did not emerge until 2008, when weapons and €10.5m of cannabis were seized in Co Kildare. While gardai knew of Kinahan’s activities via intelligence sources, they were not aware of his gang’s size and sophistication. According to security sources, gardai learnt the drugs had been imported through a legitimate food company set up by Kinahan, with its own fleet of vehicles and warehouse.

The gang were later found to be running similar operations in the UK. A fuller picture of Kinahan’s wealth emerged in 2010 when his organisation was targeted by a coalition of European police forces under the codename Operation Shovel. The Spanish police secured freezing orders on property worth up to €750m in dozens of countries across Europe and South America. According to the Spanish, Kinahan had invested €500m in holiday resorts in Brazil alone and €160m in Spanish property. His own villa in Marbella was valued at €6m.

Kinahan was arrested in the operation but not charged. However, he was extradited to Belgium where he served a short sentence and was released in April 2013.

Many in the security services believe Kinahan’s success is down to a mixture of luck, an ability to smuggle drugs and weapons, his knowledge of police investigations, his gang’s ability to launder money, and the failure of gardai and other police forces to realise his potential.

The transnational nature of his gang is also a key element. Kinahan and his associates do not reside in any one country but are continually on the move, for security and business reasons. While Kinahan primarily lives in Spain, he also spends time in Poland, Dubai and Brazil.

The gang is “very security conscious”, as one intelligence officer put it. “They don’t use phone calls, to avoid intercepts and tracking. They don’t take chances.”

Instead they organise almost everything through encrypted emails and text messages that police forces find almost impossible to decipher. The Kinahans have their own servers in the Netherlands and America, which they use to send and receive emails via custom-made BlackBerry smartphones with PGP encryption — considered among the most secure systems. To date, they have successfully managed to avoid infiltration.

The gang also has huge financial resources. Kinahan is a drugs wholesaler who purchases cocaine for €1,500 a kilo in South America and sells it in Europe for €40,000 to €50,000. Gardai believe the gang supplies almost every type of drug, weapons and other contraband.

The threat posed by the gang has made recruiting informers difficult, say gardai. “They have a fearsome reputation. If you cross them, you die, or they will kill your family. Every decision they made is a strategic one. They are currently killing people in Dublin aligned to the Hutch family because they perceive them to be a threat,” said one garda source, who blamed them for the murder of Eamon Dunne, a gangland figure shot dead at the Fassaugh House pub in Cabra, Dublin, in April 2010.

Dunne was blamed for killing up to 16 people, which had resulted in increased garda activity in west Dublin. This, in turn, hit the sale of drugs. “Dunne had to go, so they killed him,” said the garda source.

The Kinahan gang has been linked to 36 murders in Ireland, Britain, Spain and Holland in recent years. The true figure may be higher, with victims vanishing without trace. Some murders in Holland involved extreme violence, including decapitation.

Jon Moran, reader in security at Leicester University who researches organised crime, said almost all powerful gangs followed one of two defined routes. “When criminal gangs reach a certain size, one of two things happen. They either move into legitimate business or they implode.

“There is a natural barrier to the growth of organised crime groups in Europe. In South America, cartels are capable of threatening the government, as we’ve seen in Colombia, but that doesn’t happen in Europe. Usually they get so big that law enforcement comes under pressure and has to wipe them out,” he said.

Moran suspects several factors help Kinahan evade justice. “Every police force in Europe is focused on terrorism; organised crime has dropped off the radar,” he said. All police forces, not just the gardai, must review how they confront powerful criminal groups, he feels. “Any group willing to use violence to kill numerous people must be considered a public threat. These are criminals that act like terrorists.

“If terrorists murdered five people in Dublin, there would be a EU-wide response, but when criminals do it, it’s considered to be a local problem. I would make the argument such groups should be reclassified as a public threat,” he said.

Moran is particularly concerned by the assumption that asset seizures have an effect on crime. “Freezing assets actually motivates criminal gangs to commit more crime. Drug traffickers don’t turn around and say they’ll seek employment as milkmen when their assets are frozen. They don’t suddenly decide to go legit. They go out and import more drugs to make up the money,” he said.

Many gardai agree. Last month, the force seized 11 luxury cars and motorbikes including Mercedes, BMW, Golf GTI, Lexus and Land Cruiser models, from Kinahan’s associates in Dublin. Gardai do not expect the owners to even seek their return.

Whether the gardai have the commitment, ability and resources to pursue such an investigation is in doubt. Last week Garda Headquarters declined to answer questions over its response to the gang.

Moran says traditional policing methods are the only response. “Old-fashioned criminal investigations, boring as they are, are what really damage gangs. Proper investigations into murders that result in gunmen, and those who direct their activities, going to jail for long periods really work,” he said. “If you lock people up for a long time, their organisations fall apart.”