Getting Away With It – how Ireland's crime cartels thrive in Spain

We’re sitting under a parasol outside a bar in a plaza in a typical tourist resort in the south of Spain. Evening is approaching, but it’s still a broiling 30-plus Celsius outside. My companion is a senior officer of the Civil Guard, which is the largest police force in the country.

We’ve come to chat over a few beers about the bloody feud between the Christy Kinahan and Gerard Hutch gangs, which has turned into an annihilation – with at least ten deaths so far both here in Spain and back home.

The scene highlights the differences between law and order here in Spain, and back home. In the plaza, to the right of us, there is a group of South Africans – known locally as Negros, which is not considered a derogatory term here: it means black – congregating around a park bench. You’d need to be blind not to know what these guys are up to: selling cocaine, marijuana, pills and whatever else you’re having. Idly, I find myself wondering if any of the drugs are from shipments being brought in by the Kinahan cartel.

To our left, there is a line of young prostitutes, known locally as putas – that’s ‘whores’ in English – who offer sex for about €50. Mostly young women of eastern European extraction, with a few South Africans among them, they’re standing against the wall touting for business. Some of them look strung-out. There is an appearance of boredom in their eyes. Others sit on cardboard boxes eating pot noodles. Whatever you think of sex work, it is hardly an appetising scene.

There is a police station only yards away from all of this action. I turn to my contact and ask, “Is there a reason why you guys don’t arrest them?”

“Because,” he answers, “this is Spain. Things are done differently here.”

I put that in my pipe and smoke it...

LEGITIMATE BUSINESS

Our rendezvous was set-up to see if I could glean any new information about the Kinahan cartel’s operations in Spain. I was shocked by what I was told. The Civil Guards haven’t, according to my source, been paying a blind bit of notice to what, certainly from an Irish perspective, is an all-out gang war.

To understand why, you need to look at the way policing works in Spain. The Civil Guards are largest police force in the country. But there is a second, called Policia Nacional (The National Police Corps), also known as CNP.

It works this way: the Civil Guards are in charge of towns or cites under 60,000; the CNP is tasked with pursuing criminal acts and public order offences in bigger metropolitan areas.

A few days prior to our meeting, I had mentioned the names of many of the key Irish players in this bloodshed to my contact – including Christy Kinahan, his sons Daniel and Christy Jr, Francis Delaney and Gerard Hutch himself, among others.

“We have no fingerprints and no files on these men,” my source tells me. “Technically, if they are even in Spain – and we truthfully don’t know where they are or what they’re up to – they would almost certainly be travelling here under fake passports. They are probably slipping in and out of the country on a regular basis, but we just don’t know. For us, they are ghosts.”

He might be one of the most wanted men in Ireland but at the moment – and despite the fact that he has already spent time behind bars in Spain for drugs and money-laundering – it appears that, if Christy Kinahan were stopped by the Civil Guards for an offence like speeding, they would simply hand him a fine and wave him on.

“Of course, if we had any precise suspicion about any of these names you mention, we could get their finger prints from Interpol,” he says. “But these men are not on our watch list. We have no reason to be investigating them – at the moment.”

I also speak to an NPC source. “Right now, the narcos do not feel too much pressure from the police,” he admits. “The coast is still a good place from which to work.”

According to this source, the National Police Corps spent over eight years investigating the Kinahan clan, in a major operation called Operation Shovel – but they came up with zilch.

“We could not prove they were dealing drugs or gun running,” he says emphatically. “I can guarantee you that if it could have been confirmed they were dealing drugs or selling guns they would be behind bars right now.”

“All their money appears to be in legitimate businesses, like property, both here and abroad. And I’d imagine a lot of it is under different names. We don’t even know what type of businesses or properties they’ve put their money into. It could be here in Spain, or it could be in the Middle East or even Latin America.”

MONEY LAUNDERING

Back in March, a clearly frustrated chief prosecutor for the Marbella area, Julio Martinez, gave El Pais – one of Spain’s most prestigious broadsheets – an interview in which he claimed that money laundering charges against Christy Kinahan and his two sons were “imminent”. He confessed that he had originally hoped to arrest the Kinehans for drug-trafficking and gun-running, but admitted that the staggeringly long police investigation had been fruitless. “Expectations were high, but the results have not been as satisfactory as we’d anticipated,” he said at the time.

It appeared then that the only remaining strategy would be to go the Al Capone route and chase Kinahan and his two sons for tax evasion. But seven months on, the Kinahans have yet to be served with any summons, or even brought in for questioning.

One Spanish police source tells Hot Press that there is simply not enough evidence for charges on money laundering. “I would be surprised if it even goes to court,” he says, “because from what I’ve seen, the evidence is flimsy at best. If we had the evidence, they’d already have been charged.”

The Christy Kinahan gang has been exceptionally smart, according to the same source. “They use gangs from South America,” he states, “and West African gangs too. They never seem to get their hands dirty themselves. As I say, we can’t even tell where their cash is invested.”

There was talk in June of a Garda gangland task force being established in Spain. Assistant Commissioner John O’Mahony told a media briefing that he believed they would “build up relationships, pass on information and to get things done.”

The Spanish police had been keeping a vigilant eye on the gym owned by the Kinahan’s and raided it on several occasions without success. In August, however, the Gardaí and Spanish police were back there as part of a manhunt for one of the killers in the Kinahan/Hutch feud. Subsequently, in the Costa Del Sol in September, a Dublin man – as yet unnamed – was arrested, in a joint operation by the Spanish police and the Gardaí, in connection with the murder of Gary Hutch.

“Let’s see if this joint venture works,” a civil Guard source tells us. “But we are
sceptical. We spent eight years investigating this. No offence, but the Irish police are not just going to come over here and succeed overnight.”

Another Spanish source puts it bluntly. “Their presence in Spain will have little effect. Besides, there’s rumours now that Christy Kinahan is in Dubai! He could be anywhere.”

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE

In some respects, Spain is like modern Ireland. Life is cheap. You can hire a hitman here, via the Internet, for €6,000. In an eerily accurate comment, Paddy ‘Dutchy’ Holland – the man accused of murdering Sunday Independent crime reporter Veronica Guerin – summed things up in 2009. “Shooting people is normal now,” he told me. “And it’s not going to get any better.”

One notorious Irish hitman, who claims that he refused to handle some of the recent hits, believes there is only going to be one end to this gruesome spat. There’s rumours that Christy Kinahan uses ex-Mossad agents as bodyguards in the Middle East when conducting his business – all of which would make it look like mission impossible for the Hutch contingent, with their apparent lack of firepower, to avenge the deaths of the close family members and associates that have died.

“I can only see one end to this,” the hit-man says ominously. “Whatever went on between them, and whatever the bad blood is about, they have Gerry Hutch in their sights. Unless there’s some miracle, it will end only if and when they deal with him. And even that might not be the last of it.”