TIrish sportswriter Kieran Cunningham belongs to a small group of investigative journalists who have a right to be proud of his courage and persistence in exposing Daniel Kinahan and his damaging control of boxing. Last Tuesday, in a extraordinary press conference in Dublin, US government officials highlighted their determination to crack down on the intimidating drug cartel allegedly run by Kinahan and his family.
“I would never think of it in terms of vindication,” Cunningham says after emphasizing that journalistic heroes are the Irish crime reporters who investigated Kinahan long before he took up boxing. “I was relieved, because he has taken up a lot of space in my head for years. He felt like hitting his head against a brick wall. Everybody who works in boxing would just say, ‘This is boxing. It has always been like this. As long as the fights are made, they don’t care.”
Cunningham acknowledges that omertà is driven in part by fear. In an equally insidious way, there is no corner of boxing that is not linked in some way to Kinahan. I have spoken to many boxers and trainers, most of whom are good people, and are unwilling to speak out officially for fear of retaliation or being banned from the sport. To be sure, Kinahan has been generous to the fighters he mentors, but in return they have had to ignore or dismiss the accusations surrounding him. He has become a source of shame and embarrassment for boxing. For this reason, it is instructive to listen to Cunningham and Stephen Dempster, another investigative reporter who last year produced BBC Panorama Documentary which brought general attention to Kinahan’s involvement in boxing.
“I’m not this great moral compass,” Cunningham says as he explains how boxing intersects with the deadly feud in Dublin between the Kinahan and Hutch gangs. “Where I live in Dublin it is 15 minutes from the north city centre. That is boxing country. There is a street called Champions Avenue where so many boxing champions came from. Kellie Harrington, who became an Olympic champion last year, is from there. It’s close to where Muhammad Ali fought Al ‘Blue’ Lewis at Croke Park 50 years ago this summer. Just down the street you’ll find the Point Depot, as it used to be called, where Lennox Lewis, Naseem Hamed and Tyson Fury fought.
“Seven of the people killed in the dispute between Hutch and Kinahan died on these very streets. Boxing it’s Ireland’s international sport by a mile, and it’s the closest to the Irish psyche. I like to box people because there is a rawness and truth to them. A lot of them are abused by boxing and it really bit me that Kinahan was seen as one of the good guys. I always knew he was going to be toxic. Professional boxing south of the border has already been killed.”
In February 2016, the Irish Gardaí believed that Hutch’s gang was aiming to kill Kinahan at the weigh-in for a European lightweight title fight. Instead, in a case of mistaken identity, David Byrne, who was associated with Kinahan, was allegedly shot and killed. Revenge killings followed and since then there have only been boxing shows in small halls in Ireland.
Dempster, a boxing fan and investigative journalist, hails from Belfast, where the sport still thrives. His reaction to last week’s announcement of US sanctions against the Kinahans and the offer of a $5m (£3.8m) reward for information leading to his arrest is made echo the response of many. “I was surprised,” says Dempster. “I have never seen a press conference where government officials and law enforcement officials were so open. They are generally very cautious about giving names and potentially harming future legal action. For years, the Irish Gardaí did not even say the name ‘Kinahan’. They would talk around it. This was a total game changer. Now you can see the dominoes slowly falling down one by one.”
Kinahan remains in exile in Dubai and denies any wrongdoing. But Thursday yesterday was revealed that the United Arab Emirates has frozen the assets of the Kinahan family. Cunningham explains that “Ireland has been pressuring the UAE for years to extradite Kinahan. But Ireland is a small dot on the edge of Europe. The United States is the world’s superpower and the United Arab Emirates is willing not to fight with the Americans. So last week everything changed.
“What surprises me the most is that it took so long. Why wasn’t there this kind of reaction to the Panorama documentary? Barry McGuigan was the only boxing person to appear on the show. He spoke and he was very brave. The reaction was to just attack Barry from within boxing instead of targeting Kinahan. There was no follow-up to say, ‘How does Kinahan get involved in the sport? How do we get rid of this guy?’”
Kinahan was an advisor, rather than an official manager, to all the fighters who championed him so passionately. He could not be banned or stripped of influence from him by the British Boxing of Control because “advisors”, unlike fighters, trainers, managers and promoters, do not require a license to operate. And so, Kinahan became one of the most powerful men in boxing as he negotiated world title fights and negotiated big television deals with other promoters. No one could avoid dealing with him.
As Kinahan fighters mocked McGuigan on social media, thinly veiled threats were made against those implicated in the Panorama documentary. “We all had to think about our safety, but personally it didn’t affect me because we were more in the background,” says Dempster. “It was addressed to Darragh MacIntyre [who presented the programme].”
Cunningham also considered the dangers: “My wife, Peigi, asked me a couple of times not to cover this story. I sat down with her and told her that she had to get on with it. I told him that a lot of crime journalists cover this story. They don’t have invisible armor and they’ve managed.”
Boxing, meanwhile, carried on. “I remember the day after the Panorama screening, you spoke to Robert Smith from the British Boxing Board of Control,” says Cunningham. “The was cleared how limited his powers are in stopping someone like Kinahan. That should be a priority. Boxing has to implement some process to prevent another Kinahan from entering the sport.”
Neither Cunningham nor Dempster has any lasting hope that boxing will ever be regulated and hope that rival sanctioning bodies are still focused on chaos and profit. Some experts expressed concern to me that Kinahan might even control boxing from a prison cell.
But this week the boxing landscape has clearly changed. MTK Global, the management company Kinahan set up in 2012, insists they have had no ties to him for five years. However, they announced that they will stop trading at the end of April as other organizations now refuse to do business with them. Probellum, a separate company, has also refuted allegations that they are linked to Kinahan, but the Discovery Channel and Eurosport decided this week not to air their fight promotions.
“Kinahan ended up in boxing,” says Dempster. “If the Americans really want to catch him, they will.”
Cunningham, who is working on a four-part podcast series about Kinahan and boxing, agrees: “It’s game over for Kinahan. The powers of the Americans are so broad that they can freeze the bank accounts of any business that has a connection to Kinahan. A lot of people in boxing would be nervous because it’s a crisis for the sport. At the press conference they named some of the companies they are investigating. The implication was that more will be named.
“What really needs to change is the governance of boxing. The WBC is in theory the main governing body, but its president, Mauricio Sulaimán, sang Kinahan’s praises last month. This week he’s done a couple of U-turns. If these are the people we’re looking at as gatekeepers of the sport, what hope does boxing have?
Cunningham and Dempster hope boxing will somehow change in the wake of this month’s seismic events. “During the Panorama investigation,” says Dempster, “we had a list of boxing gyms in England and visited professional trainers and fighters as well as grassroots people. There were real people who welcomed us. But the first thing they said was: ‘We’ll talk to you, but we don’t want to go on the record.’ They were scared of Kinahan and didn’t want to rock the boat because he had a lot of power. These were good people who were upset, dismayed, and depressed by his evil influence. I have been in contact with them for the last week. They are relieved. I feel vindicated by them.”
