'Ghost', the Kinahans and the gangs that replaced them

It has been a bad week for organised crime, particularly the Kinahan organised crime group.

Once the most violent and dangerous criminal organisations in Ireland and the UK, it is now, according to the head of the Garda National Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau, "no longer the primary organised crime group in this jurisdiction".

As if to emphasise the point, six hours after Detective Chief Superintendent Seamus Boland had made this statement, the two most senior figures in the gang in Ireland and the UK admitted their guilt in a firearms conspiracy case and are now facing several years in prison.

Liam Byrne

Liam Byrne is the leader of the Byrne organised crime group, the Irish branch of the Kinahan organised crime group which was based in Crumlin in Dublin.

A career criminal with convictions for violence and burglary, he was heavily involved in drug trafficking and violent crime and had connections to international cartels in the UK, Spain and the Netherlands.

The 44-year-old also ran a car sales company in Co Dublin as a front for money laundering, concealing and moving the gang's money. LS Active Car Sales did not operate like a normal business as it sold very few cars.

Instead, it moved them back and forth between Ireland and the UK and also provided luxury cars for gang members.

Its showroom in Bluebell was used for meetings by members of the organised crime group.

Byrne’s business flourished until the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) shut it down the year after the murder of Liam’s brother, David, at the Regency Hotel in February 2016.

That murder escalated the ongoing Hutch-Kinahan feud that has claimed the lives of 18 people.

CAB identified 45 assets linked to the Byrne organised crime group which were the proceeds of crime.

These included 31 luxury cars and eight high-value pieces of jewellery - including a 3.6-carat white gold diamond ring for Byrne’s partner Simoan McEnroe. CAB also confiscated two houses which included Byrne’s home in Dublin and was the stronghold and base for the gang.

2 Raleigh Square was bought for €250,000 in 2011 by his sister, Maria, but Byrne lived in it with his partner and two children.

He paid a mortgage of €2,000 a month but spent another €750,000 on renovations including a bar, a gym, a home cinema, a jacuzzi and an all-weather pitch and playground in the back garden.

He also put in walk-in wardrobes, Italian tiles, televisions, electronic equipment and expensive furnishings and lighting.

The house had bullet proof windows, electronic gates and a sophisticated CCTV system with remote controlled cameras outside.

The walls of one of the rooms - where gang members met and socialised - were laden with framed sports memorabilia including a pair of Mike Tyson’s boxing gloves. It also contained bottles of all brands of alcohol, including vintage champagne.

Fellow senior gang member and friend Sean McGovern lived nearby on Kildare Road. He is currently in Dubai but is wanted here to face a charge of murder. CAB also seized his house.

Byrne’s late brother David lived two doors down while Liam’s sister lived in a house behind. His father and mother - James and Sadie - lived across the road.

A patriarchal figure for the gang, James 'Jaws’ Byrne, who was also a CAB target and paid them over €200,000, was laid to rest earlier this month. Byrne was not allowed out of jail in the UK to attend his funeral.

Thomas 'Bomber' Kavanagh

While Liam Byrne was the head of the Irish branch of the Kinahan organised crime group, his brother-in-law Thomas Kavanagh was the head of the UK branch of the gang.

Originally from Drimnagh in Dublin, ‘Bomber’ Kavanagh as he is known, has a long history in organised crime and has previous convictions here for armed robbery, assault, fraud and gun crime.

He was 19 when he received his first criminal conviction and has been in prison several times including serving a seven-year sentence for possession of a firearm.

Kavanagh also went by the name Paul Christopher Harvey and was an associate of the convicted drug dealer Christy Kinahan senior who set up the Kinahan organised crime group. Christy is Daniel and Christophers Kinahan’s father.

All three have been sanctioned by the US authorities who have offered a reward of $5m each for information leading to the conviction of either of them.

Kavanagh also threatened to kill a detective garda who was investigating drug dealing in the Crumlin and Drimnagh area.

A feud between two drugs gangs there, one linked to the Kinahan gang, erupted in the March 2000 after gardaí seized €1.5m worth of cocaine and ecstasy. The feud resulted in the deaths of 16 people.

Kavanagh subsequently moved to England to head up the Kinahan gang’s operations in the UK.

In Ireland, he had been under pressure not just from rival criminals but also from gardaí and CAB, which sent him a tax bill on the proceeds of crime for over €125,000.

CAB also seized his house in Drimnagh but by then Kavanagh had moved on to a luxury mansion in the village of Tamworth, just outside Birmingham.

The house was heavily fortified with bullet proof windows and reinforced doors and a wide selection of combat weapons including swords, knives, coshes and stun guns.

Cash totalling €50,000 in sterling, euro, dollars and Emirati dirhams was found stashed all over the house, stuffed into drawers, bags, under cushions and down the back of the sofas.

The grounds were covered by CCTV and an Audi A8 Spyder car was parked in the driveway.

Kavanagh travelled extensively for the drugs business, and he regularly went on holiday in Spain, Mexico, the US and the Middle East.

A good friend of Daniel Kinahan, he was a regular visitor to Dubai where the three sanctioned gang leaders are based.

Gang meetings were mixed with expensive hotel stays, lavish meals, drinks and visits to Disneyland Dubai.

Kavanagh and members of his UK gang celebrated the success of drug shipments by heading to New York.

In November 2016, one of them, Gary Vickery, sent a picture to his wife of twelve men with drinks on the tables and their arms around each other in a bar.

Vickery was smiling along with Kavanagh and Declan Brady, the Kinahan gang's quartermaster and a money launderer who travelled from his home in Co Kildare and is currently serving a lengthy sentence in Mountjoy Prison.

Kavanagh also held UK gang meetings in luxury hotels such as the Hyatt in Birmingham.

In the twelve months from October 2016 to 2017 the gang brought in 23 multi-million euro drug shipments, an average of two a month, a total street value of €36m.

He lived in the UK for over 20 years and kept a low profile. However, following the murder of David Byrne, and his identification as a Kinahan gang leader, he was convicted of defrauding Revenue and fined £83,000.

He was also subsequently jailed for three years after police found a stun gun, which in UK law is a disguised firearm, in his Tamworth home.

It marked the beginning of the end of Thomas ‘Bomber’ Kavanagh’s criminal career.

The Gaffer

Kavanagh was the boss and known as 'The Gaffer.' He ran a well organised, highly sophisticated and extremely lucrative drugs smuggling network which supplied cocaine and cannabis to the UK and Irish markets.

They set up false companies which were registered in Companies House in the UK, but never traded.

The gang included Gary Vickery and his brother-in-law, Daniel Canning.

Both were born in Dublin and are now convicted drug dealers, serving lengthy prison sentences in the UK. Vickery is serving 20 years, while Canning is serving a 19-and-a-half-year sentence.

The gang rented offices and warehouses in Wolverhampton and Wednesbury in the names of the false companies and used legitimate logistics and haulage companies, unbeknownst to them, to transport their drugs and cash.

The drugs were concealed is specially modified heavy industrial machinery.

Much of the work was done in the rented units. Sections of machines were removed and replaced with new parts which were then sprayed to match the original paintwork, right down to the exact colour code.

Steel strapping combination kits, cardboard boxes and polypyrene tape were used in the packaging.

Fellow drug dealer Canning bought much of it and usually paid in cash in Scottish and Northern Irish sterling notes.

However, he also often settled balances with his credit card which enabled the purchases to be traced.

Secret compartments were built into the industrial machines. The gang used three tarmac removers to hide the drugs on the way into the UK, and to hide the cash as it was sent back out to Europe to pay for the shipments and future purchases.

The cocaine was high quality, 75% pure, and the gang had barrels of boric acid to cut it down for street sale. This created greater bulk and higher profit.

Each consignment had a tracker device attached so the gang would know where it was at all times and where to find it if it was lost or stolen.

The trackers were bought in Poland and supplied by a Polish man known as ‘Z’ who lived in Ireland. He also owned an industrial unit in Barcelona. His current whereabouts are unknown.

The gang also had a European manager who organised the shipments from there. Kavanagh was his contact. He was subsequently arrested by German police.

The elaborate crime network and drugs routes can be mapped and identified through the movements of the trackers.

One started in Poland before moving to Ireland and over to Birmingham the following day, then to the Wolverhampton unit where it was attached to a machine transported on a Hungarian registered lorry from Dover to Calais.

Over the next eight days the machine was tracked through France to Belgium, on to the Netherlands and then Germany before moving back through Belgium and parked up in the Netherlands for two days. It then moved back to Calais and entered the UK through Dover.

Other loads were tracked through continental Europe and on to Barcelona, while more shipments entered the UK through Felixstowe.

The gang was also heavily armed and involved in gun running. It made and modified special steel containers, such as a lead-lined transformer, to conceal and transport its firearms.

The lead prevented the guns and ammunition from being discovered on x-rays at international borders.

The modifications to the firearms transport containers were also carried out at a rented warehouse in the west midlands in the UK.

The seizure that led to the demise of the Kinahan gang’s UK operations took place on 2 October 2017 at the eastern docks in the port of Dover. A Polish driver working for a transport company was stopped.

He told customs officers that he had loaded up his consignment of two large tarmac remover machines in Germany. However, the manifest said the shipment had originated in Romania.

The customs officers dismantled the machines and discovered the drugs concealed in the hidden compartments.

They found 200 packages of cannabis in the first machine and 200 more in the second, along with 15kg blocks of cocaine. The drugs were valued at over €2.6m. The GPS tracker was also discovered.

The gang’s rented units and the gang members’ homes were searched and more than €250,000 in cash was found, along with encrypted phones, a cash counting machine, a handgun and ammunition, an industrial transformer with traces of cocaine, 25 barrels of boric acid and a box of tracking devices identical to the one seized at Dover.

The plot and the guns

Kavanagh knew he was in trouble and facing a lengthy prison sentence after he was arrested and charged with drugs smuggling and firearms offences.

He and Byrne came up with a plan in 2020 to try to curry favour with the UK authorities to get him a lighter sentence.

Kavanagh first approached the National Crime Agency (NCA) in December 2020.

He was interviewed by officers in April 2021 and told them he had intelligence about an arms cache of between 10 and 20 weapons, which were said to have been smuggled in from the Netherlands.

He even provided a map with instructions through his solicitor with an X marking the spot in Newry, Co Down.

The NCA contacted the PSNI. PSNI officers then went to a farmer's field where they found, buried just beneath the surface, two holdalls containing the guns and ammunition.

There were 11 firearms in the bags, including three Skorpion submachine guns, three Heckler and Koch guns, an Uzi submachine gun, and ammunition from the UK, the Netherlands and Ireland.

Kavanagh hoped the discovery of the guns would lead the NCA to commend him for helping them take dangerous weapons off the streets and that this would be looked upon favourably by the court in sentencing.

However, the plan was foiled because French and Dutch police had, a year earlier, infiltrated the encrypted 'Encrochat' communications system which Kavanagh and the other gang members had been using.

They passed on information to the NCA, which used some of the text and email messages from the encrypted devices in the drugs trafficking case against him.

When they reviewed the ‘Encrochat’ data in relation to the firearms seizure, they concluded that Kavanagh's tip-off was a set-up.

The NCA not only withdrew its cooperation, it also commenced a criminal investigation, gathered the evidence and charged Kavanagh and Byrne with conspiracy.

"They're tuned to a certain way to use coded language"

The plan not only backfired but made the situation worse for both gang leaders and others.

Kavanagh and Byrne were both charged with conspiring to possess prohibited weapons and ammunition.

Kavanagh was also charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, namely to "possess firearms and thereafter to hide them and then reveal their whereabouts to the National Crime Agency to enable Thomas Kavanagh to receive a reduced sentence with intent to pervert the course of justice".

Kavanagh never got his reduced sentence for drug trafficking; on 28 March 2022, the father of six blew a kiss to his family from the dock before he was led away to begin a 21-year jail sentence.

Dinner in Spain, breakfast in prison

After CAB shut down his illegal car business and took his Dublin home, Liam Byrne moved for a time to the UK before settling in Dubai with the rest of the Kinahan gang leadership.

However, unlike Daniel, Christy or Christopher Kinahan, he did not confine himself to visiting countries in Africa and the Middle East with no extradition agreements with Europe.

Byrne was a regular visitor to Spain. Last year, he flew into Palma airport on the Balearic Island of Majorca.

He was eating dinner at a restaurant in Alcudia on 28 May when officers from the Spanish National Police, supported by the NCA and gardaí, arrested him on foot of an extradition warrant.

The warrants were obtained after the encrypted 'Encrochat' messages implicated him in the firearms conspiracy. He has been in prison ever since.

Byrne contested his extradition in the Spanish courts but lost and on 12 December 2023 and was escorted back to the UK by a team of officers from the NCA’s joint international crime centre.

He was brought before Westminster Magistrates’ Court and was remanded in custody.

He and his brother-in-law originally pleaded not guilty, and the trial was scheduled to begin on 2 September this year.

However, after two weeks of legal argument which could not be reported, in a surprise move Kavanagh and Byrne admitted what they had done and pleaded guilty late on Wednesday evening.

Judge Philip Katz KC said he would sentence the men on 21 October and remanded them in custody until then.

Infiltration

Organised crime at the highest level has always used coded language even if, as Detective Chief Superintendent Boland says, "they are sitting in a room with no windows having a conversation".

"They're tuned to a certain way to use coded language," he said.

The problem for the gangs however is that law enforcement has proved itself more than capable of decoding and understanding that language.

Organised crime groups had, for years, been lulled into a sense of security by the apparent secrecy of the 'Encrochat’ system.

However, it turned out to be a false sense of security because the French and the Dutch effectively broke the code of Omerta in 2020.

It marked the beginning of the end for the Kinahan gang’s most senior figures in Europe.

Kavanagh, Byrne and their associates Gary Vickery and Daniel Canning, along with many others, were prolific users of the encrypted system on their Blackberry and Aquarius devices.

Kavanagh had eight phones, Vickery had six and Canning had three.

Codewords

Kavanagh was at the top and was referred to in conversations as "The Gaffer", "Plasma" or "New2". Vickery was called "Jelly" and Canning was "Smiley".

"Paper" was a reference to cash. "360" was £360,000. "Sister" was the codeword for one of the machinery concealments. The "Hot" was Spain. The "Flat" was the Netherlands. "Barca" was Barcelona.

"Phones" was the word for cocaine and "Jackets" was the codeword used for packages of flowering head cannabis.

In early September 2017, Gary Vickery (GV) and Thomas Kavanagh (TK) discussed in code a drugs collection that Canning was ordered to make in La Rambla, the main street in Barcelona.

They also referenced a subsequent reward for Canning. The conversation was forwarded to Canning in Spain.

Sent: 7 September 2017

GV to TK: "Mate the lad that smiley is collecting those jackets off is it poss for him to meet him somewere cause were he dropped them is on the la rambla".

TK to GV: "I gave smiley mail 2 lad for jackets down der ok."

GV to TK: "Mate are we throwin smiley a drink for the 2 times he went hot to give out money and for goin today to sort things"

TK to GV: "He will b rewarded mate'' but just leave for now ''not good time 2 b sort money."

TK to GV: "Is it poss we hire a truck and pull it out ?"

GV to TK: "I'll ask the question , I'd say best way do that would be to get the fella who smiley got truck of to rent threw his company of a place down in the hot cause I very much doubt they would give to smiley walkin in of the road would have be threw a company"

Kavanagh (TK) also issued directions to Canning (DK) in Spain by text to be careful about a cash handover in an underground car park in Barcelona and to make sure he stayed with the money.

Sent: 18 September 2017, 9.39pm

TK to DK: "Just get him 2 say he been told he not 2 move ontill all is. all was suppose 2 b ready 3 week ago."

Sent: 19 September 2017, 1.57pm

TK to DK: - "Dat paper is not 2 b left alone full stop."

Sent: 19 September 2017, 6.15pm

TK to DK: - "Ok a hotel nearest to we're he is park in der and lad will come strate for it."

It was these, and other intercepted ‘Encrochat’ conversations, that put the Kinahan gang members behind bars. They were not the only ones.

Following the infiltration of the encrypted communications network, there have been 6,558 arrests worldwide of which 197 are described as ‘high value targets"

€900 million in criminal assets have been seized or frozen, and 163 tonnes of cannabis, 103 tonnes of cocaine and 3.3 tonnes of heroin have been seized.

923 weapons, 21,750 rounds of ammunition and 68 explosives have been recovered.

971 vehicles have been confiscated, as well as 271 estates or homes, 83 boats and 40 planes.

Ghost

While 'Encrochat' was the first encrypted system to be infiltrated by law enforcement agencies, it was followed two years later by ‘Ghost’. This criminal communication system was set up nine years ago by a 32-year-old Sydney man who lived with his parents.

He launched the network and began building dedicated encrypted communications devices (DECD's) that prevented messages from being intercepted by authorities

He then allegedly sold his DECDs for about AUS$2,350 (€1,434), using a network that vetted new ‘Ghost’ users before they were allowed into the system.

He was arrested on 17 September and is currently before the courts in Australia.

The network was attractive to criminals because users could purchase ‘Ghost’ without supplying any personal information.

It used three encryption standards and offered criminals the option to send a message followed by a specific code which would then delete all messages on the target phone.

This allowed the criminal gangs and gang members to communicate securely, evade detection, counter forensic measures and coordinate cross border illegal operations.

Around 1,000 messages were exchanged each day on ‘Ghost’ by several thousand users.

By the time the system was compromised in 2022 following a joint international investigation by the Australian, Canadian and French police, the FBI and gardaí, there were more than 600 active ‘Ghost’ phones around the world.

Four hundred of those were in Australia. The remaining two hundred were in Italy, Sweden, Canada and Ireland.

Gardaí seized 42 ‘Ghost’ phones but believe there were about 100 of them in Ireland because they suspect those who had them did not hold on to their devices for long, but regularly replaced them.

‘Ghost’ was used solely by criminals for large-scale drugs trafficking, money laundering, extreme violence including homicides, and other forms of serious and organised crime. Ireland had the second highest number of users.

Europol described the international police operation as "sophisticated" and "a major action against an encrypted communication platform used for criminal activities".

It also described the criminal organisations that were targeted as "high risk" and "operating from all four corners of the world".

As a result of the infiltration of the encrypted network, gardaí carried out 33 searches and seized more than €15.5m worth of cocaine, cannabis and heroin, along with €350,000 and cryptocurrency.

Twenty-seven premises were searched on Monday as part of a coordinated international day of action.

Gardaí also recovered two cryptocurrency keys, 27 laptops, 126 other mobile devices, 200 SIM cards, 6 Rolex watches and a 2021 Range Rover Jeep.

153 other mobile phones were seized along with the 42 ‘Ghost’ devices.

News of the infiltration has created consternation, panic and fear within the circles of organised crime.

Worried gang members have been dumping devices, resorting to basic burner phones, meeting to try to find out what is going on, how it happened and if they and their criminal activities have been compromised.

This, according to the Garda Commissioner, is exactly what gardaí want.

"We have to introduce an element of paranoia into how they work," Drew Harris said.

"We want to be sure they are feeling vulnerable around their communications and how they work with one another. That gives us investigative opportunities. The upper echelons within the organised crime groups were using the ‘Ghost’ system."

Eleven people have been arrested in Ireland so far, bringing the total to 51 people worldwide. Thirty-eight were detained in Australia, and one each in Italy and Canada.

A drug lab was also dismantled in Australia, while weapons and huge quantities of drugs - along with more than €1 million in cash - were seized globally.

The changing nature of Irish organised crime

The nature of organised crime in Ireland has changed since the murder of David Byrne at the Regency Hotel in Dublin in 2016.

This is due to a number of factors, including the success of garda operations, their international partnerships and the infiltration of the criminal encryption systems which, up until a few years ago, were believed to be secure.

The Kinahans are no longer the kingpins here as new organised crime groups and street gangs have moved to fill the vacuum left by its demise.

However, the demand for drugs is higher than ever before and the quantities seized are also higher than in previous years.

The new gangs, however, appear to have taken a different approach to the business by moving away from the murderous policy of the Kinahan organised crime group.

Even before it commenced its vendetta against the rival Hutch organised crime group, and the killings - amongst others - of the brother, nephews and friends of the leader Gerard Hutch, the Kinahan gang had a reputation for extreme violence.

It was the Kinahan organised crime group that murdered the late Finglas criminal gang leader Eamon Dunne, known as 'the Don.'

Dunne was not only perceived as a threat to the gang’s Irish drugs operation, he was also seen as reckless and dangerous, having ordered the murders of so many others.

Dunne was shot dead as he attended a birthday party in a pub in Cabra in Dublin on 23 April 2010. A four-man hit team arrived. One waved a gun and ordered the smokers outside away.

Another guarded the door while the remaining two gunmen went in a shot the 34-year-old several times in front of his 17-year-old daughter. No one has been caught or convicted of the murder.

Such gangland killings were rife at the time, but this is no longer the case. There were 20 gangland murders the year Eamon Dunne was shot dead and 22 the year before.

Last year there were four, this year there has been one.

Spikes

There have been spikes over the past 14 years, in 2012, 2016 and 2019, but these can be connected to murderous criminal feuds that were ongoing at the time.

Sixteen people were shot dead in 2012 and 2016, largely because of the feud between the Kinahans and Alan Ryan’s Real IRA in 2012, and the Hutch-Kinahan feud in 2016.

The murders rose again to double figures in 2019 when a feud broke out between criminal gangs in the northeast.

This became known as the ‘Drogheda feud’ but it was met with a strong response from gardaí.

The investigation resulted in most of the key figures being jailed, while others died or went into exile.

One of the main protagonists, Robbie Lawlor, was shot dead in Belfast before he could be charged with the murder of 17-year-old Keane Mulready-Woods who was lured to a house in Drogheda and his body dismembered.

Lawlor’s bitter rival, Cornelius Price, died of cancer in a hospital in Wales.

There is no doubt that the dramatic reduction in gang-related murder in recent years is largely due to the success gardaí have had against the Kinahans and other organised crime groups.

Over 80 Kinahan gang members and associates have been convicted and jailed in the past seven years, most by the Special Criminal Court.

These include the most senior gang figures here, the convicted murderer Freddie Thompson, the hitmen Eamon Cumberton and David Hunter, and the gang’s armourer Declan Brady along with his wife, his mistress and his brother.

This has not gone unnoticed by the organised crime groups here that replaced them.

Once Kinahan affiliated, these gangs have now established themselves as independent entities and appear to have taken a markedly different approach.

One, known as ‘The Family’, is based in west Dublin and is now the principal supplier of heroin and cocaine in this country.

While violence remains part of these gangs’ tool kits, they seem to have resiled from lethal violence, the type that brings public opprobrium, political action and a robust police response.

The organised crime groups operating in Ireland today seem to have learned the lessons that their predecessors - the Kinahan and Byrne organised crime groups - ignored to their cost; that bodies on the streets are bad for business.